Quite popular these days as the removable data transfer and storage device, Memory Stick was introduced in the late 1990s. Its can be used with various electronic devices like personal computers, digital cameras, digital music players, PDAs, cell phones and portable gaming consoles for copying and transferring data to another electronic device or the personal computer.
The earlier Memory Stick models had a capacity to store data from 4 MB up to 128 MB, and were thicker in size than the recent models. To address the market needs and provide more data storage capacity, Sony introduced the Memory Stick Select. This version had two separate partitions of 128 MB each. Subsequently in 2003, the Memory Stick PRO was launched as a result of joint efforts between Sony and SanDisk to overcome the space problems of the earlier models and to provide higher transfer speed. With the growing demand for a smaller memory stick, especially for small pocket-sized cameras and cell phones, Sony introduced the Memory Stick Duo. However, due to limited storage capacity of 128 MB and slow data transfer speeds, the model did not become as popular as the Memory Stick PRO. Subsequently, Sony introduced the Memory Stick PRO Duo, which combined the features of both the Memory Stick Duo and the Memory Stick PRO formats.
These Duo/PRO Duo formats are available with a transfer speed of 159 Mbit/s (20 MB/s), minimum write speed of 15 Mbit/s and maximum write speed of 80 Mbit/s. By December 2006, the Sony/SanDisk Memory Stick PRO-HG was released, which had a data transfer speed three times that of Memory Stick PRO. This format had an 8-bit parallel interface in addition to the conventional serial and the 4-bit parallel interface. These features facilitate several gigabytes of data to be transferred fast, and also support the real-time recording of high-resolution video and still images.
Sony and SanDisk launched another Memory Stick format called the Memory Stick Micro (M2) was released, which is one-fourth the size of the Memory Stick Duo. It is available in different storage capacities such as 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB. The recent Memory Stick Micro models come with an adapter so that it is compatible with other Memory Stick devices.
Other memory cards are CompactFlash. It is available in two varieties, I and II (launched in 1994) with storage capacity from 64 GB up to 8 GB. SmartMedia (launched in 1995) has storage capacity up to 128 MB.
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