Pretec Rolls Out World's Smallest miCard-Based Drive

USB flash drives, as well as memory cards have evolved quite a lot during the past few years and it seems that now they've crossed paths, with the implementation of the miCARD standard by the MMC Association, a standard that allows the development of complex storage solutions that work both as USB flash drives and SD/MMC memory cards. And one of the first companies to have put this standard into practice is Pretec, who announced at Computex 2007 the S-Diamond, a minuscule device with quite impressive data-storage capabilities.

The miCard is a fairly new concept, which has been announced just a few days ago. The specs are still unknown, but the MMC Association has promised to release them sometime in June. What's known so far is that the cards will be extremely versatile (working with both USB and SD/MMC interfaces without the need for a special adapter) and will be able to provide very high transfer speeds (up to 480Mbit/sec), as well as huge storage spaces (up to a theoretical maximum capacity of 2048GB). Quite a large number of Taiwanese card manufacturers have rallied behind this new standard, including A-Data Technology Inc., Asustek Computer Inc., BenQ Corp., Carry Computer Eng. Co., C-One Technology Corp., DBTel Inc., Power Digital Card Co. and RiChip In.

However, as mentioned earlier, the first company to have actually announced a device that respects this standard is Pretec, with its S-Diamond series. And the manufacturers don't tout it as the world's smallest USB drive for nothing, as the device measures just around 21mm x 12mm x 1.95mm, thus having an area 40% smaller than miniSD cards (the overall volume is about 18% smaller than in the case of miniSD).

Nevertheless, we'll have to wait just a bit longer before this thing hits the shelves, as Pretec announced that the actual mass production will start somewhere in Q3 of 2007. There's no pricing information available at this point either, but the devices in the S-Diamond series will most likely cost quite a pretty penny, considering how versatile and innovative they are.

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