flash memory chips

Sherman Black, a senior vice president at Seagate Technology, the leader in hard disk drives, lies awake at night worrying that his teenagers are part of a new generation of computer users who don't care if their data is stored locally or on the Web.

It matters to Black's industry because a growing number of consumers are eagerly eyeing a new wave of solid-state disk drives. Made from arrays of flash memory chips, these new drives are smaller and many times faster than the traditional hard disk disks that read and write magnetic ones and zeroes on a rotating platter.

Toshiba, Japan's largest chip maker, reported a quarterly loss on Wednesday after the global economic slowdown aggravated a glut in the market for chips used to store data in consumer electronics.

The net loss was yen26.8 billion, or about $275 million, in the three months that ended Sept. 30, compared with a yen25 billion profit a year earlier, the company said. Sales fell 7 percent to yen1.88 trillion.

Toshiba joins Samsung Electronics and Sony among electronics makers reporting lower earnings this month.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Wednesday it has withdrawn a $26 a share bid to acquire SanDisk Corp., but suggested it was still interested in buying the U.S. flash memory card maker at a lower price.

In a letter dated and released Wednesday, Samsung Vice Chairman and CEO Lee Yoon-woo informed SanDisk's board that "we are no longer interested in acquiring SanDisk at $26 a share."

The letter said the offer was being withdrawn "after nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress."

Kingston Technology Co. has teamed up with Intel Corp. to market flash memory-based drives to top makers of laptops and servers. The pact with chipmaker Intel is a shift for Fountain Valley-based Kingston, the leading maker of memory modules for computers.

Kingston traditionally has taken a "wait and see" approach to new products. It waited years to get into flash memory cards for consumer electronics, which now make up a quarter of Kingston's $4.5 billion in yearly sales.

Data centers in the U.S. have created a carbon footprint that is larger than that of countries such as The Netherlands and Argentina. Internet companies such as Google are investing billions of dollars in setting up massive data centers and struggling to control soaring power usage. While Google may want its users to trawl thousands of terabytes of data and get their search results almost immediately, this activity gobbles up plenty of energy.

Some big names have been sniffing around at Aliso Viejo's SiliconSystems Inc., a privately held maker of flash memory drives for industrial uses. Disk drive makers Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC and Lake Forest's Western Digital Corp. have been arranging chats with Chief Executive Michael Hajeck for some time now.