San Disk has announced that a mouth-watering 8 gigabyte Compact Flash cartridge will be able in November, for the eye-watering price of $959 (or €959). That's twice the capacity of the current generation of hard drives powering devices such as the iPod mini.

The company claims the Ultra II disk can write at 9MB/sec and read at 10MB/s. San Disk also unveiled 2GB SD cards and 4GB Memory Stick Duos today, the latter priced the same as the 8GB CF card.

At these prices, only professional photographers - San Disk's target market - may be tempted today. But with memory plummeting every year, it's evident that where we find today's lower capacity HD-based power guzzlers, we'll see nice, cheap solid state devices in only a couple of years. Although Samsung has shown a phone with a traditional, Winchester hard drive the SPH-V5400 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/06/samsung_hdd_handset/), which is expected to retail for $800, the phone manufacturers can safely bide their time. ®

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