1 terabyte thumb drive, coming soon

[deadrats]

http://legitreviews.com/news/14859/

i wonder how much one of these bad boys will cost, i could definitely see myself picking up a few of them if the price is right.

[jman98]

Expect to pay nearly $2000 US for these for years to come. Even the 256 GB ones, which are hard to find, are in the upper part of the $500-600 range.

[jagabo]

Given that the 256 MB versions are selling in the $500 range, I suspect the 1TB will cost around $2000.

[mh2360]

Only 5 or 6 years ago you could expect to pay over $50 for a 8GB stick, now $50 would easily get you a 64GB stick.

Who knows what $50 will get you 5 or 6 years from now.

[aedipuss]

amazon has the 512GB ones and they sell for $1750 i'm guessing more like $4000 for the 1TB

[yoda313]

I don't know about you but I'm still waiting for those 200tb holographic discs we've been promised

And of course the flying cars from Back to the Future 2 - 2015 is not that far away now you know

[johns0]

Given that the 256 MB versions are selling in the $500 range, I suspect the 1TB will cost around $2000.

I bought a 256 mb usb for $40 a few years ago.I knew you meant 256 gb,just had to say that.

And of course the flying cars from Back to the Future 2 - 2015 is not that far away now you know

They already have those cars,didn't you see the nissan versa commercial with them flying?

[hello_hello]

How fast are the larger capacity drives? The largest I have is 32GB bit it takes something like an hour to fill it from scratch. If the 1TB models are that slow......

[aedipuss]

the kingstons are rated 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write (in USB 3.0)

with the recent usb3 upgrade speeds up to 1GB/s are being advertised.

[Tom Saurus]

I remember when DVD burners for computers were 800 or 900 bucks a piece. They have certainly dropped in price. These will drop in price eventually. I have read that Seagate made a breakthrough in hard drive technology and they can make hard drives that have a capacity of 1 terabyte per inch. So there is talk of 20 tb hard drives. There is also talk that they think they can improve on that and get up to 60 tb hard drives. With 1080p video and the super HD down the line we are going to need massive drives to hold such files. One hopes for a speed and hard drive longevity boost as well.

[Baldrick]

I remember when CD burners for computers were $700. My older brother bought one for me because he wanted a mixed CD...

[johns0]

I bought my first cd burner for about $200 when they were affordable.

[hello_hello]

the kingstons are rated 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write (in USB 3.0)

with the recent usb3 upgrade speeds up to 1GB/s are being advertised.

If memory serves me correctly it takes about a minute for me to copy a 4 gigabyte file from one internal hard drive to another. My drives are a few years old now so no doubt newer drives would be a little faster, but if they could move a 4GB file in 4 seconds I'd be pretty happy.

I had a look at Kingston's site and of the thumb drives I looked at which included a speed specification, the fastest seems to be the DataTraveler HyperX Predator which is 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write as you said (maximum capacity is 512MB/s at the moment), which is a bit faster than mechanical hard drive speed. I guess my old USB2 thumb drives still plod along at 30MB/s read and 20MB/s write which is why they're so painfully slow.... in fact if my "1 hour to fill a 32GB drive" estimation isn't too far out it means they're writing at under 10MB/s.

A quick search didn't reveal any Predators for sale where I am (Australia) but I found several places selling the HyperX 3 which is only marginally slower, and of those the best price seemed to be $203 dollars for the 128GB model and $468 dollars for the 256MB model, which I guess would leave the 1TB model selling for around $2500. For the moment they seem to cost around twice as much as an equal capacity solid state drive.

Looks like jman98 is correct. Oh well..... in 5 years time when all the 2TB hard drives sitting in docks on my desk are wearing out it might be worth another look.