SanDisk on Thursday expanded its storage options with its first ExpressCard flash drives. Simply titled the Express series, the new cards are designed to shuttle data at the speeds needed for high-end HD video and still cameras where SD and even CompactFlash would be too slow. It should be the first card to meet the jointly-developed SxS rating from SanDisk and Sony that guarantees high transfer speeds for video, according to the former company. Sony's XDCAM EX is the first camera to support the card, but the universal nature of the format will allow any camera or storage maker to support SxS, SanDisk says.

The long, narrow ExpressCard/34 format used by the Express line also lets it hold a large amount of storage without sacrificing speed. Versions of the cards will ship with either 8GB or 16GB of flash memory and store a respective 30 or 60 minutes of full-resolution HD video in MPEG-2 format; the XDCAM EX will hold dual cards to give professional editors twice as much space. Both cards support the MacBook Pro and any Windows notebook with an ExpressCard slot, and will ship to Europe as well as North America by November at prices of $500 and $900 respectively.