By Matthew Henry
SYDNEY: Sony has doubled the capacity of its flash media storage products with its latest round of upgrades, increasing its flagship Micro Vault USB drive and Memory Stick Pro Duo card to 8GB maximum capacity.
Before now, Sony offered flash memory products with capacities up to 4GB and has joined others including SanDisk in jumping to 8GB flash chips in recent months.
“By introducing this phenomenal amount of storage capacity, Sony is responding to the rapidly growing needs of digital photographers and portable entertainment device users,” said Sony Australia assistant product manager for recording media, Maurice Satya.
“Both the 8GB Micro Vault and 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duo are great when travelling or for those who don’t have ready access to a PC for storage.”
Sony’s Memory Stick Pro Duo range now spans 512MB to 8GB sizes (RRP $59.95 to $599.95) with seven products in the range, including high speed 1GB and 2GB models, while the Micro Vault USB drive range spans 1GB to 8GB sizes (RRP $64.95 to $499.95).
Users can download Sony’s Memory Stick File Rescue software free of charge to recover files which have been lost or deleted.
Sony’s 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duo will hold up to 19 hours of video for a PlayStation Portable, almost 3,000 10 megapixel photos or 2,000 mp3 songs.
With the jump to 8GB, USB drives now surpass the storage capacity of DVD (4.7GB) making them an ideal solution for PC file transfer and backup.