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New USB 3.0 Flash Drive Has 2 TB of Storage
First time accepted submitter Dr Max writes "During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information. So far neither company has released anything official in regards to specs or a simple introduction, nor does the high-capacity USB 3.0 stick appear on Display Taiwan's website. But as seen in the video below, the 'Thin Card' thumb drive is even smaller than a thumb, measuring slightly thicker than a penny. It offers a minimum of 16 GB and a maximum of 2 TB."
you can only read back the first 1GB...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Did they come up with a hardware implementation of the wavelet intelligent compressor? ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We can fit 64MB on a microSD card, so why it it surprising that something much larger can fit 2TB?
Wow, and I thought we were done.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Okay okay, I'll be quiet now. :D
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I bet this will cost you around $10,000.
From one of the comments on the linked site:
On the video it says "Actually the one that we looked at on display was only 16GB but the technology behind that particular 16GB stick is capable of scaling to 2 Terabytes." In other words they'll have to wait years for smaller manufacturing processes to occur before a 2 TB drive is made.
I cannot watch the video to verify it.. but if true, then the news is as good as spam
USB3 devices exist. Thumb drives exist. multi-TB drives exist. With enough money, you could have all three. I looks expensive. Cool toy, though.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
From the comments on TFA: On the video it says "Actually the one that we looked at on display was only 16GB but the technology behind that particular 16GB stick is capable of scaling to 2 Terabytes." In other words they'll have to wait years for smaller manufacturing processes to occur before a 2 TB drive is made. Well, of course we'll have 2TB flash drives someday. Submitter and Tom's didn't actually watch the video before using this headline.
Have you seen my Library of Congress? I dropped it around here somewhere.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
What market does this target? In the past, removable solid state media like CF cards and SD cards (mostly CF cards) were well taken by professional photographers because it meant they could fit more pictures on a single memory card, which meant as long as their battery lasted, they could continue working uninterrupted.
I think everyone here agrees that the 2GB-8GB flash drive/thumb drive has completely replaced the floppy drive in this decade. People are still leery about keeping important data on a thumb drive for long periods of time, either due to ease of loss or possible read/write problems down the road (cue the know-it-all slashdotter telling me that they've solved all those problems despite continued miniaturization throughout the last half-decade.)
So who are these for? Eventually the 2TB thumb drives are going to drop below $500, then below $150, and be mass produced for $99 or less during a Thanksgiving Black Friday Sale in our near future.
Blu-Ray is only 50-60GB completely maxed out. That's the biggest common media I can think of that consumers have access to these days. Even all of Wikipedia will fit in a 60gb rar archive. Databases are bigger than 2TB. Or if you want a better reference, the plans for the Deathstar are bigger than 2TB. I'm not sure your sysadmin would recommend you walk around with your company's (or Empire's) most important IP in your pocket where it might get lost.
I'm not trying to say 640KB is enough for anyone.... but is it? How much space do consumers really need for portable, temporary storage, vs enterprise use? And do you really want your enterprise data on a portable, corporate espionage-sized device?
moox. for a new generation.
First she shows a 16GB card, and only says that the technology supports 2TB. She never said they have one that exists or plans to release a 2TB version. Just that the technology supports it. It is like me saying a 64bit OS supports 8TB of RAM. It may happen in the future, but not any time soon.
Hmmm. I thought Lzip was no more! Kudos for a unexpected development! Can't wait for hardware enabled >99.9% compression!
Hope they've ironed out the decompression bugs, though.
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
This article highlights exactly why Toms Hardware sucks so much for the better part of a decade. The video in no way says they have a 2TB thumb drive just that when the flash gets scaled down further it could support 2TB. And as always, the Slashtard "editors" make no effort to actually find any of this shit out before posting a misleading summary to a stupid and misleading article.
So really she was just selling what could happen, some day. She could have just as well promised 2pb or 2eb instead, and promised it inside a postage stamp.
So in summary:
However
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
However, if it is or will be true in the near future, then that would be incredible. What would happen if you married this with the raspberry pi computer?
I think that's now legal in Iowa.
There is no 2TB drive. This is a 16GB with an _interface_ that could support 2TB. But wit present FLASH chips that cannot be fit into the case shown. May take another 5 years or more. Incidentally, old USB2.0 can already interface 2TB.
So this is really a rather nomal-sized 16GB USB3.0 stick, or in other words nothing special a all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well I know I plan on backing up all my future data on easily portable and concealable high capacity thumb drives! I'll just have a drawer full of them!
USB 3.0 supports a MAXIMUM throughput of 5.0Gbit/sec, and even at that insane rate it would take one hour (with 10% protocol overhead) to read or write two terabytes. We're lucky though; at USB 2.0's best rate it would take over 10 hours, with Full Speed USB 1.0 it would take 2½ weeks, and good old Original USB would literally take from now until late evening of January 14, 2012. Nostalgic for floppies? Using a fast backup program, you could do the job in 3½ years with 1.39 million 1.44MB coasters. Watch out for fridge magnets though!
Why on earth would you want to store video at a resolution greater than the number of photoreceptors in the human eye?
Control of pan and zoom at playback time, perhaps?
Imagine every star trek episode and movie from any series and all 12 hours of LotR and the Matrix movie (2+3 never happened, right?) and all the SW, indiana jones, and james bond movies all on a tiny keyring
It probably won't happen for another century because the copyright owners would object. Can you think of a scenario where data created by home users would top 2 TB?
I wonder if they intend to incorporate an on-chip compression mechanism. In that case, if I have 2TB of text files or sparse files, it might compress down to 16GB. Doubtful, but in theory it could "scale" to that.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
It's an old but clever China Hack.
I worked for a merchandise company, I was the graphic artist, and had to design numerous USB-memory sticks in all shapes, beer bottles, dolls, ice-cream...you name it, fun stuff to... but there's where the fun ended:
Most of the cheaper sticks we got from China was fakes all the way, but they where SMART fakes. Yes, they where re-programmed 1-8 gb sticks, sold as 16-32 gb sticks back then, but programmed in a way so you...the user...never would find out that they're fakes, how? you may ask... ...simple and smart - the more you load onto the stick, the slower it will operate, the nearer you come it's actual size limit, the slower it will add files, at first...most people don't suspect a thing, they just think...oh what a slow stick...bummer...but it works, and let's face it...the average user NEVER exceed 1-8 gb with their personal stuff, you think average joe runs around with a collection of DVDs on their sticks... NO! Take it from me...I've delivered THOUSANDS of these sticks in all varieties to all companies, big or small....we get VERY few returns despite this.
I know...because I just took a look at the boss of our company, he uses those sticks at work too...of course...we use what we sell, but he didn't discover a single thing, but I could hear him swear and curse the memory stick or the computers for being too slow... ...and it took me AGES to explain to my non technical boss that this was a programming trick inside the memory stick, he just couldn't understand how that was done, he said...but it's 32GB LOOK...and then he'd take the time to show me the properties of the drive etc...specs...etc...oh dear...all over again.
And he's an advanced user, what do you think the average joes out there figures out. Nothing!!! And the China factories gets away with it ALL THE TIME!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
The latest version of SD cards (XC) also have the capacity to scale to 2TB.
"SDXC, the latest SD memory card standard, dramatically improves consumers’ digital lifestyles by increasing storage capacity from more than 32 GB up to 2 TB." Source: https://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdxc
Move along, nothing to see here.
I think that word does not mean what you think it means The title "New USB 3.0 Flash Drive Has 2 TB of Storage" is blatantly wrong. Unless the word "Has" has suddenly changed meaning in the English language.
they've advanced on the just the write-only part, now they can read endless zeroes too. Just think, an operating system and computer have been required to have a /dev/zero up to now, but now you can have a 1.936 T of /dev/zero plus 64GB of read/write in a miraculous little stick.
a picture of a sad kitten with the caption "Capitalism corrupts".
Dude, hook me up!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'll bite. I can understand the cynicism, but this reminds me of one feature I really wish USB flash drive makers would actually consider putting in their devices:
An onboard controller with AES-256 encryption, the keys stored on a dedicated chip (not with the rest of the flash drive contents), and everything encrypted.
Couple this with a password mechanism that would zero out the keys if too many guesses are attempted, and loss of this flash drive can be mitigated.
For blue-sky features, perhaps add a GSM transceiver so the drive can get a "kill" message, as well as a setting where if the drive doesn't see a GSM prompt in "x" amount of time, zero out the keys.
it is also insightful. what happens when you can store perhaps not the LoC but the entire contents of a university library? And then students copy it. And copy it. And if it is all in PDF, suddenly you can search inside documents, making research trivial....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Those devices already exist; IronKey and MXI Security produce those.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Very true. However, it would be nice if newer USB flash drives supported encryption and secure erase as part of a standard, just like how hard disks have the ATA password protection on the controller.
It looks like the majority of the consumers don't share the same concerns that you and I do. A lot of gadgets don't have many security/privacy options, or if they have them they're more like tacked-on (e.g. iPhone). Ergo, what companies supply is the basic stuff, or crappy mock-ups (i.e. SW-based encryption options).
I agree, even if the features aren't enabled, the chipset should have those pieces in place for future products. It is a missed opportunity.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Simpler improvement: Just make the key into a hash of the password. That way it's impossible to get the key out, even if you have the tools to take a chip apart atom by atom.
You sound like the guy that was behind me in line when I bought my first 2GB drive. He gasped "What are you going to use that for. You will NEVER fill that up!" I looked at him and told him that the first thing I was going to put on it was the 2 CD game I had at home that doesn't play great because of CD drive speeds. That would fill up 3/4 of the drive that day. In fact, I wasn't going to keep the game on the HD because the drive was too small for that and the rest of my data.
The basic principle you quote is wrong. It is only said because people don't realize how far behind our needs we were with availability. They said the same thing about processor speed. Look at us now. The vast majority of people don't care how fast their processor is because they would have to go out of their way to find one that was too slow for them. That is if the could find one.
I remember spending close to $150 of a 16GB SLC thumb drive.
Up until about a year ago, the market was flooded with MLC drives that could not offer comparable write speed or reliability but did cost 1/10th of that price.
Now I see some USB 3.0 thumb drives posting impressive speeds. I wonder what NAND technology they use.
No, all of the world's porn is larger than the contents of the LoC.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Well, I guess it is time to replace my old 128 MB thumb drive. On second thought, no, I'll hold onto it awhile longer. After all, it's not even full yet.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Awesome!!! How much is it?
Why would anything have a 2Tb file system limit? 4GB I can understand, since it's 2^32 addresses for each byte; the next limit for a file system should be 2^64, or 16,777,216TB. Yeah, different processors will cap off @ 64 address lines, but I don't get why a file system has to go by their limitations. What's the file system limit on Ext4?
The U.S. government isn't the only entity with access to super-resolution methods. As long as there are enough camera shakes in the video to move the CCD sampling areas, fine details can be extracted from the aliasing left in the image.
Who foretold the prophecy?
Saltzman. He's in accounting.
(South Path, World of Warcraft)
seems to fit.
Changing the world... one research project at a time.