Whoa!
I popped the flash card out of my brand-spankin’-new Zonbu unit before I left the office, expecting to see the familar Zonbu logo on the 4GB card that I’ve seen on the various pre-shipment review sites.
Instead, I got an eyeful. Mine is… BIG.
My Zonbu came with a SanDisk Extreme III 8GB flash card.
Suffering suckatash! Is this a change in strategy?
A response to a supply shortage?
Is someone guessing who Mr. Zonbu is and planting an easter egg so as to unmask me? Oh you naughty Zonbu boys.
Anyone else want to check their unit and tell us what they got for Christmas?
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
Hah! That’s awesome! Probably their supplier ran out of 4 gig drives. That’s nuts. I hope they’re getting them at a discount!
Hank
After reading about your good fortune I anxiously popped the card out of my also newly arrived today Zonbu. As soon as I saw the green card I knew I wasn’t as lucky as you. Congrats on the bonus. If Mr. Zonbu doesn’t deserve a little something extra, then who does? 🙂
Easter eggs! Ohhh hurry customs, hurry! I wonder who got the 16GB card… 🙂
That 8 GB CF card you got really was a nice present. The cheapest I can find that particular Sandisk ExtremeIII card for is $124.99 USD
http://computers.pricegrabber.com/flash-memory/sandisk/m/19328860/search=extreme%203
I just took a closer look at the CF card that came with mine. It’s the RiDATA 4GB 150x Supreme Series. Here it is on Newegg for $55 shipped
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183055
Unfortunately the user reviews for this card don’t look too good and it seems to have a high failure rate.
Funnily enough, before I ever found the Zonbu I was working on VIA based flash machines to replace a bunch of network servers in my data center. They arrived today as well, but the CF cards aren’t here yet. I just bought 9 x 8GB cards and 2 x 16GB cards for those boxes… go figure.
You’re right, 8GB cards are pricey. http://dealnews.com/memory/ has the 8GB Kinston for $85 right now, but a SanDisk Extreme III is a much more advanced card.
I’m kind of bummed abou it actually, I don’t want an experience that is different from other users. If it turns out I have faster throughput thats going to skew my results.
We’ll see what happens. I’d appreciate a comment from the Zonbu people on this. Who else got an 8GB card?
-Mr Zonbu
We had some extra SanDisk 8GB cards and a few customers have got them instead of the standard 4GB. You got one of them.
We are still struggling to source both 4GB / 8GB reliable and high-performance cards. The flash market is currently extremelly volatile. CF manufacturers take the excuse of the iphone to explain the shortage of flash ram. At Zonbu, we recentely had the feeling to be like traders in an oil market! The bottom-line is that we are buying what we can in Taiwan and Israel and then give to customers what we have. Hopefully, the situation will smooth by the end of the year and will offer the same card for everybody with perhaps an option to upgrade to a bigger one.
Technically, getting a bigger card increases the size of your internal cache. It doesn’t have any impact on your total storage. The consequence is that the rotation of the cache is less frequent. For standard usage (documents and music), 4GB is more than enough – we did a lot of tests. If you have some video files, 8GB will add a little bit more of flexibility but 4GB will still work very well.
Grégoire Gentil for the official Zonbu