Silicon Power’s UDMA 300x Compact Flash card from Silicon Power comnes in three sizes for your storage needs — 2, 4, or 8GB with Ultra Direct Memory Access 45MBps transfer rate. To be seen soon in Japan for $200 for the full 8GB.

Radboud University Nijmegan (in the Netherlands, and quite a mouthful), has developed a laser-based storage system that is 100 times quicker than the plain old hard drive (POHD) we’re used to. There’s been a bunch of research into light-based computing, and much of it’s been pretty positive–if not yet quite practical. Now, if they can shrink this thing down to a reasonable size, they’ll really have something.