Burn Some Rubber with SanDisk's New Ducati CF and SD

Do you think it's possible to combine memory cards and motorcycles? Well, I for one do not, but who am I to question the intricate ways of the technology gods?

Sandisk has announced on the eve of the U.S. Grand Prix MotoGP race on July 22 at Laguna Seca in Monterey, California a speedy partnership with motorcycle manufacturer Ducati. Sandisk claims that the new "turbo-charged" Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash and the Extreme Ducati Edition SD Plus are the fastest cards in the company's lineup.

As the press release informs, the SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition cards are the result of a sponsorship and marketing relationship between SanDisk and Ducati Corse, the racing arm of Italy's famed Ducati motorcycle company. The line-up consists of 4- and 8-gigabyte capacities for the SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash card and 4GB for the SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition SD Plus card.

The latter features a snap-open connector that enables the card to be plugged in directly to the USB port of a personal computer without requiring a cable or reader. Distinctive bright red labels and packaging bear images of Ducati MotoGP racers and the Ducati Corse emblem.

Now don't expect anything spectacular from these cards. It's not that they have discovered a new amazing technology, the improvement being modest. For the CF cards, the SanDisk officials talked about 45MB per second, which is only 5MB more than the Extreme IV regular products. However, you know as well as I do that these speeds are rare in practice.

On the other hand, having some Ducati cards at a racing event when other photographers are "struggling" with their "ordinary" CFs and SDs might be enough of a reason to purchase them.

And now let's hear it from the Sandisk official Tanya Chuang, director of worldwide retail product marketing for the high performance imaging market at SanDisk: "With the SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition cards, we have reached a new threshold of speed - 45 megabytes per second for the CompactFlash cards and 20MB/sec1 for the SD Plus card. These speeds allow for fast transfers of images from the cards, and are especially useful for professional photographers in their work-flow environments."

Availability is slated for August in North America and Europe and the suggested retail prices are $164.99 for the 4GB CompactFlash card, $314.99 for the 8GB CompactFlash card and $129.99 for the 4GB SD Plus card.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .