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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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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!