Short Version: SanDisk’s slotRadio player provides good value as it pertains to content, with the $99 kit featuring 1,000 popular music tracks and an attractive hardware player. The “radio” portion of the slotRadio name should be given close attention — you can skip tracks but you can’t go backwards, and everything’s played in random order, just like conventional radio.

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USB drives come pre-loaded with tons of security rubbish these days and if you’re a Mac user that want to utilize these options, the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise is for you. Both the PC and Mac users can use the tools that includes a secure, encrypted storage area to hid all your little nasties protected by 256-bit AES encryption. The Cruzer Enterprise is available in 1-, 2-, 4-, and 8-GB flavors now.

Sandisk announced a 16GB micro SDHG card back in September and is now followed by Toshiba, whose model (SD-ME016GA) will be released in Japan in January next year [JP]. According to Asahi Shimbun [JP], one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, it will cost around $200 (Toshiba itself speaks of open prices).

Toshiba also announced two SDHC cards. The SD-C16GT6 holds 16GB and will cost $200 when it hits Japanese stores in April next year. An 8GB model (SD-C08GT6) will be available in Japan for around $100 next month.

Toshiba hasn’t said yet if or when the cards will be available outside Japan.

Avoid the stampede at Walmart next Friday by picking up that Memorex Blu-ray player for $149 at Buy.com (free shipping, too). While you’re at it, you can also get the first-gen iPod Shuffle-like Sandisk Sansa Express for $10.99 (refurbished).

Hurry, though. These things are going to sell out quickly.

LINK [Buy.com]

Oooh, that’s a good deal. Woot.com has the 2GB SanDisk Sansa Clip (see our review here) for a paltry $15.99 + $5 shipping. It’s refurbished, yes, but come on: you could spend on coffee, donuts, smokes, and sodie pop before you even make it into work. Why not pick up a little MP3 player instead? Makes a great stocking stuffer, too.

Sandisk Clip 2GB MP3 Player [Woot.com]

Owners of the SanDisk Cruzer line of flash drives might be interested to learn that its now possible to launch the Veoh Web Player directly from the U3 interface that pops up when the drive is inserted into a USB port. You can use the Veoh software to schedule and download various types of web video directly to your Cruzer drive to create and ever-changing, on-the-go content library.

The Veoh feature will be available on new Cruzer flash drives and can also be installed separately onto existing Cruzer drives by going to www.sandisk.com/veoh and downloading an update. Full press release after the jump.

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Quick Version: Starting at under $40, the Sansa Clip from SanDisk makes an excellent wearable MP3 player if you’re looking for something small that still has plenty of features.

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Nice and simple. The SanDisk Sansa Clip now comes with 8GB of memory for $99. It still has the same OLED screen, 15 hours of battery, and yes, a clip. Available now.

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So SanDisk has said they’ve got a technology called ExtremeFFS that will increase random SSD write speed by like a million percent. Sounds great, right? So what is it? Well, what they do is take all the stuff that’s going to be written on the SSD and instead of trickling it to the disk at the maximum random write rate (very slow compared to sequential writes), it writes it to “virtual storage,” assumed to be RAM, and then writes it to the SSD at the maximum rate it can go.

Wait, did I read that correctly? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this entire “technology” just a bigger cache? The write speed is not improved at all, it’s just tricking the OS into thinking it’s writing onto the SSD as fast as it is writing onto RAM. I guess that kind of makes sense, but it’s a bit misleading, and seems like it would be pretty taxing on the RAM.[I stand corrected] The technology does have some other benefits, however (NAND channel independence is good), and it doesn’t appear to harm anything, so I guess this is good news.

Update: I believe I misinterpreted this! It decouples the physical and logical location of a piece of information, so that when data is physically written, it is written to the location that is fastest and easiest for the SSD — based on free blocks and anti-wear-and-tear algorithms — and the information on the physical location is kept in “virtual storage,” and the OS can’t tell the difference because the shuffling is done at the controller level.
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Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, here’s the skinny: Samsung offered to by SanDisk for $26 per share in cash which is promptly turned down by a unanimous BoD vote. We explain why Samsung wants SanDisk, and then yesterday, Samsung withdrew its bid. 

SanDisk’s official response:

From the start of this process SanDisk’s Board has remained open to a transaction that recognizes SanDisk’s long-term value and contains the right protections for SanDisk’s shareholders. We repeatedly outlined a clear path to hold further discussions, including most recently in our letter on September 15, and Samsung consistently chose to ignore that path and, in fact, never contacted SanDisk regarding their proposal after we delivered our letter. We believe this raises questions about the real motivations behind Samsung’s offer.

So there.

Oh, these multi-billion dollar companies and their flings! I thought they would have made such a cute match, too. Actually, probably not, but still. Was Samsung’s game just not good enough? Was SanDisk playing a little too hard to get?

Romantic conceits aside, it looks like SanDisk just wasn’t willing to give in and give up control of such a strong brand to the beast that is Samsung. They held out after rejecting the offer initially, and now Samsung is walking away, too. SanDisk would rather sell off some expensive assets and introduce some bad-ass new products to invigorate the company than become another head of the Samsung hydra. SanDisk doing it for herself!

Check out the whole release — plus saucy letter — after the jump.
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