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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Starlight who wrote (19490)	3/7/2001 5:32:33 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Betty, the 256 and 512 mb cards that SanDisk intends to produce initially at its Manassas, Virginia joint venture with Toshiba would hold from 4 to 8 hours or more of music, or a full length movie. This is not to say that other types of storage aren't in demand. It's simply a fact that non volatile, low current, no moving parts, and extreme reliability of flash cards will prevail in the portion of the market where those features are considered important. As for flash memory prices, we can speculate on whether lower prices are based on weakening demand or lower manufacturing costs, or both. We are now seeing flash card prices approaching $1 per mb, which should expand the market in short order. Frankly, I think there are a lot more important uses for flash cards than downloading music. Photo business applications, such as photojournalism, weddings, real estate listings, insurance claims, police investigations, and catalog illustrations probably have a larger market than amateur photos, at least in terms of total number of flash cards sold for those purposes. Few if any of those business applications would be suitable for other forms of storage that consume more power and have less reliability. As for competition for storage for MP3 players, some people will be satisfied with lower cost players using hard drives or CDs. Others will be willing to pay for the higher cost of flash cards, in return for their convenience and reliability. One application that looks very promising is the downloading of full length movies on the higher capacity flash cards. A video could contain a "marker" that would allow playing only a certain number of times. The consumer would pay only a nominal "rental" fee for this service. The movie would be stored temporarily on the flash card, and when the consumer had finished viewing it, the consumer would be ready to download another movie. Or the consumer could also pay an additional fee for unlimited use, in which case the consumer would end up owning a permanent copy of the movie. With broadband communications available either through cable TV or wireless phones, it seems to me that this would be the preferred method for obtaining movies, in place of the corner video store. Art

To: Starlight who wrote (19490)	3/8/2001 4:02:24 AM
From: Craig Freeman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Elzabeth, a very reasonably argument can be made for 256MB of flash (512MB at the extreme) being the largest card anyone will ever need to own. It can hold almost 4 hours of non-stop music at the best resolution that "ordinary" headphones can reproduce. Unless you are a long-haul trucker, it is hard to imagine why 4 hours of music would be insufficient. And why would any trucker choose flash over CDs? CDRs are so cheap and abundant (!$.50 per 650MB) that it will be a LONG time before any semiconductor will replace this ubiquitous media. Maybe never. CDRs are scheduled to double in capacity within a year (to 1.3 GB). It is not unreasonable to assume that DVD-RAM at almost 10GB per disk will cost just $10 per disk within 5 years. IMHO, flash is for cameras, cell phone, pagers, pocket PCs and other apps where size and reliability are at a premium. The ability of MP3 encoding to reduce the size of audio files is interesting and useful ... but only useful to flash makers as a "short-term" outlet for their products. To paraphrase Mae West, "so many gigabytes, so little time ..." Craig