Sandisk the leading producer of flash memory also lends a hand to the textile industry.  Many large textile machines have used the Sandisk SDP3BI-16-201-80, 16MB PCMCIA PC Card as storage on industrial textile machines.  Large textile producers in Italy have long used these cards to store and transfer data to and from their equipment.  These industrial rated industrial temperature cards proved to be exceptional work horses.  However, these 16MB 16bit PCMCIA cards are no longer available.  Sandisk discontinued production of these cards some seven years ago, in shift to move in to the retail consumer market.  Sandisk changed their focus from industrial products to retail consumer products.  As can be seen in your local Costco with the pallets and pallets of USB drives offered in bulk.

As production shifted to consumer goods industrial users of these cards where left with a hole in their supply chain.  As today’s new laptops no longer offers a PCMCIA slot, so too has the PCMCIA cards fallen out of  favor with manufactures such as SiliconSystems, Western Digital, and Kingston.  If you are looking to support aircraft, industrial equipment too expensive to upgrade to more traditional SD or Compact Flash cards, consider evaluating the PCMCIA ATA PC Card by PCcardsDirect.  Offering capacities starting at 16MB, PCDATA16MBI, this cards is industrial shock, vibration rated and temperature tested to -40C to +85C.  View the complete offering of Industrial PCMCIA Cards at ….