Las Vegas – SanDisk announced today at Comdex that Hewlett-Packard will bundle the company’s Cruzer USB portable storage device with the new Compaq Presario Notebook PC 3000 series.
The move was heralded by SanDisk as a signal that the notebook industry is moving to phase out the floppy disk in favor of USB memory drives that, like Cruzer, pack a much larger memory punch in a much smaller device.
“HP clearly sees the value of removing the floppy disk offering and instead giving consumers a more versatile storage device such as the Cruzer,” said Bo Ericsson, SanDisk’s vice president of OEM marketing.
The Cruzer functions differently than other USB storage devices in that it features removable flash memory (SD/MMC) rather than embedded, non-removable memory. This gives users the option to increase their memory by upgrading cards rather than buying a new device.
“While a floppy disk has a capacity of only 1.4MB, Cruzers can store up to 256MB on an SD card,” Ericsson continued. “The data transfer speeds on a Cruzer are significantly faster than that of a floppy disk. The Cruzer has another significant advantage because SD cards have great interoperability – they can also be used in more than 170 products already introduced with SD slots, including a large number of digital cameras, printers, PDAs and cell phones.”
A Cruzer with a 4MB MultiMediaCard will be bundled with the new Compaq Presario 3000 notebook PCs starting immediately.
