Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate GT 2TB Is World's Largest Capacity Flash Drive (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli writes: Today, Kingston announced a product that may get people excited about flash drives again. The company has created a 2TB pocket flash drive (also available in 1TB), called DataTraveler Ultimate GT (Generation Terabyte). This is now the world's largest capacity USB flash drive. "Power users will have the ability to store massive amounts of data in a small form factor, including up to 70 hours of 4K video on a single 2TB drive. DataTraveler Ultimate GT offers superior quality in a high-end design as it is made of a zinc-alloy metal casing for shock resistance. Its compact size gives the tech enthusiast or professional user an easily portable solution to store and transfer their high capacity files," says Kingston.

Comments

when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[known_coward_69]

everywhere you go

Imagine the horror when you're overseas, no access to cheap data and you have run out of porn to watch

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

Kingston flash drives are too slow.

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Cmdln Daco]

Is the usable life of this drive long enough to even fill it to capacity?

Will it be obsolete before you can get it full?

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

#1. Yes.
#2. Duh.
I mean, 4 TB external drives are well under $200, so it's obsolete before it's even being sold.

Re:when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Imagine the horror when you're overseas, no access to cheap data and you have run out of porn to watch

For the money that this stick will probably cost, you could afford to fill your hotel room with hookers for the length of your stay.

. . . and coke . . .

. . . ask the Concierge about Blackjack locations; that's what he's there for.

. . . "Anything else you need, Mr. Sheen . . . ?"

Re:when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[dgatwood]

Ob. Futurama: "I'll build my own flash drive with hookers and blackjack. You know what? Forget the hookers. And the blackjack!"

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Desler]

This story is about a thumb drive not an external disk drive.

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the Duh.

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Joce640k]

If your thumb is as big as this thing then you should see a doctor.

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the usable life of this drive long enough to even fill it to capacity?

Wow, you really don't know how flash memory wears out, do you?

You can fill it up all you want. It's when you start to remove stuff that you risk writing to the same place again.

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[mwvdlee]

From TFA: 72mm x 26.94mm x 21mm

I've measured my own thumb; and it's not much smaller.
If I calculate volume, my thumb is actually a tiny bit bigger than this thumb-drive.
And my hands are actually pretty average.

I'd say that if your thumb is significantly smaller than this, you're either a child or you'll soon be US president.

Re:when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

What sorta piker has under 2tb of it?

Re: when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Cederic]

It was a joke. I laughed. You may need to ask someone to explain humour to you.

Re:when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

who needs porn on the hard drive when there's streaming sites?

Re:when you need to take ALL OF YOUR PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

OP's caveat:

no access to cheap data

I'm not excited

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry.

Kingston gives you the power...

[jddj]

... To lose EVERYTHING at once!

Re:Kingston gives you the power...

[Anonymous Coward]

... To lose EVERYTHING at once!

On a train by an employee of the British government, containing even more data on the British population.

Already a flawed product.

[djbckr]

For something that big, I would have thought it would have (at least an option of) USB-C. It'll be too slow to do much useful with that as it is.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Blaskowicz]

USB-A does 5 Gbps, 10 Gbps on very few connectors and pretty much no product I know of, or 480 Mbps (or 12 Mbps on old enough computers)
USB-C does 10 Gbps, or maybe 5 Gbps, or 480 Mbps on some phones. So, more of the same. Sustained write speed of the drive will make it either slow or fast, or reliable and fast concurrent reads/writes if you run operating systems or VMs from it.

USB-C has more electrical power and features, homosexual connectors and can be used on phones, so it's great if needed but we're not trying to supply power from a flash drive to a desktop or laptop?

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Joe_Dragon]

USB-A 3.1 and USB-C 3.1 is the same speed.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[dgatwood]

Either way, the target audience for expensive flash drives is mainly Mac users, and current Mac laptops don't have any legacy USB ports—only USB-C. So building such an expensive product and giving it only a legacy USB port is a really, really bad idea, and has been for at least the last year or so.

Then again, I wouldn't expect anything better from a company that still hasn't figured out after the better part of a decade that their slide-to-uncover design offers no real protection for the USB connector inside your pocket (because other random stuff is constantly shoving it open).

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today I learned I am a mac user.

USB-C is the future for certain however right now I would bet money that the connector is a small part of the market right now. In a couple of years it will be a much more significant portion of the market. A company that makes USB sticks might know a thing or two about that.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[dgatwood]

I think you're missing my point here because of my hyperbolic comment about Mac users (on average) having more disposable income than Windows users. I guess I should tone down the snark a little.

Obviously, USB-C isn't just a Mac thing. Even on Windows machines, USB ports are being phased out, albeit not as quickly. The difference is that for Mac users, those ports are here, and they're the only ports that exist on the new machines. But even Windows users (at least the ones who are serious enough to consider buying a 2 TB flash stick) know that the writing is on the wall for standard USB ports.

To put this in perspective, at Fry's tonight, I chose a cell phone charger with a USB port over a similar product with a built-in Lightning cord because I have no faith in Apple sticking with Lightning over USB-C, and they haven't even started moving in that direction yet. And that's for something that I picked up on the spur of the moment that costs on the order of pocket change.

When I buy a flash drive, I expect it to last for several years. My current flash drive dates back at least four or five years, if not more. Any flash drive that I would buy today would almost certainly need to be compatible with my next computer, not just my current one, and I can pretty much guarantee that the next one won't have any legacy USB ports. I won't want to have to carry around a clumsy adapter in my pocket all day every day just because some engineering product manager decided to cut 35 cents off the BOM price. As such, I wouldn't seriously consider spending even ten bucks on a standard-USB-only flash drive at this point, much less thousands. It would be incredibly shortsighted to buy this product as designed.

Kingston created a multi-thousand-dollar flash drive that doesn't support USB-C at a time when the rest of the industry's new products (even at the $30 level) all have both USB and USB-C built-in. That doesn't make any sense at all. This product would have made some sense a year ago, because some folks might not have heard about USB-C back then, but now... the design looks very dated when compared with the rest of the flash drive industry.

IMO, Kingston should have spent two or three months to update the chipset and modify it with a dual connector design before releasing the product, but apparently they thought it was more important to be first than to be good. As someone who buys a lot of their flash cards (SD, CF), I find that troubling, to say the least. It makes me wonder what other corners they're cutting.

Re: Already a flawed product.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no clue how stupid capitalism works.

1. It is Crapple who don't give a shit about people still using USB-A as a primary connector and will be using for a decade at least. Either that or Crapple designers are really really retarded.

2. USB sticks are slow and will remain slow until they figure out how to put SSD controllers inside. Crippled Macbook with stupid touch bar is hardly a good consumer product to aim for.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes an hour to transfer 2TB over an 5 gbit/s connection. That's not entirely useless. I would wonder whether the flash used in here is capable of maxing that out, practically the same speed as top SATA SSD.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[thegarbz]

Either way, the target audience for expensive flash drives is mainly Mac users

The target audience is anyone who's bought a laptop since the SSD era started and aren't content with their 500GB-2TB HDDs being reduced to 128-256GB. This is not a mac issue, and if it were, fuck em they can use a dongle they so rightly worship.

Re: Already a flawed product.

[dgatwood]

At first glance, I thought the same about USB ports, and I do agree that in the very short term (say the next year), they can be handy. But when I thought about it a little more, I concluded that ditching legacy USB isn't that much of a stretch. After all:

• USB devices that you don't carry in your pocket don't matter because it isn't hard to use an adapter or a different cable with them.
• USB devices that you do carry in your pocket don't matter because they are typically inexpensive and easy to replace with new versions, most of which have USB-C.

The exceptions are such a small percentage of the market that they really don't matter to anybody. So there's no strong reason for any manufacturer to keep legacy USB ports around at this point other than for the short-term convenience of customers so that they don't have to buy a couple of $10 cables.

I fully expect legacy USB to be phased out in all new models of computer released in 2017 and later, within some small epsilon. I could be wrong, but if I am, then it is either because the product line is on life support (minimal incremental changes) or because they started designing that model in 2015 or earlier.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[dgatwood]

The target audience for this is people who have an insane amount of disposable income, bought a computer with an 1 TB SSD, and still need more, and are willing to pay through the nose for a small improvement in portability and/or speed. That tends to match much more closely with Mac users. PC users are more likely to have cut corners on cost to begin with (resulting in too little capacity), and thus are far more likely to spend a hundred bucks for a 2 TB external hard drive and carry it in a laptop bag rather than spend an extra couple of grand on a pocket-sized flash stick.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[thegarbz]

Or maybe technology companies continue to develop expensive top ends to bring savings to the profitable mid sector who are their actual targets. But what would I know I only buy $75 memory sticks which for some reason keep getting bigger.

Their target market is offloading data from small devices. Your conceptions about something being over priced or people being rich and therefor this being targeted at mac users is just stupid, and I say this as someone who will happily line up to diss mac users.

Re: Already a flawed product.

[Blaskowicz]

I expect desktops to keep them for a decade, considering desktops still come out with PS/2 , even if only standalone motherboards you can buy on their own.

I'll go one up further. I suspect the general populace doesn't know about the existence of USB-C at all. I mostly know about it from wasting time on slashdot and tech news sites, really. The rare normal person that knows about it perhaps knows it as a slightly different kind of USB plug on phones.

USB devices that you do carry in your pocket don't matter because they are typically inexpensive and easy to replace with new versions, most of which have USB-C.

Not too bad, although spending 8 to 15 euros is a pain for some people. Although, when USB-C will get more widespread, only 95% computers won't support it. 99% computers will support USB-A ; 1% computers will support USB-C but not USB-A. If you insist on carrying a USB-C drive, do so if you wish but don't complain if you can't plug it at target destination, it's up to you to carry a dongle, cable, or dual mode drive.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Agripa]

Either way, the target audience for expensive flash drives is mainly Mac users, and current Mac laptops don't have any legacy USB ports—only USB-C. So building such an expensive product and giving it only a legacy USB port is a really, really bad idea, and has been for at least the last year or so.

But now Kingston can sell you an adapter and tell you that you are using it wrong. I wonder if Apple will sue them.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[dgatwood]

The thing is, Kingston is a flash part manufacturer. They don't need to develop super-high-end products, because they don't need an excuse to increase chip density beyond current levels (or at least they shouldn't). Yes, there's a benefit to having the high end for the people who really need it, but the high end for SD cards and CF cards and USB flash sticks usually means spending a couple of hundred dollars per unit, not a couple of thousand dollars. That's like the 1% of the 1% market, if that.

For a product that appeals to only a tiny niche of a niche (people who need a *lot* of portable storage and need it to fit in a pocket and are willing to spend as much as a laptop to buy it), given that Mac users have (statistically) a lot more disposable income on average than PC users, it borders on absurd to completely exclude that lucrative market when relatively small design changes could avoid that exclusion.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[syntotic]

I wasnt lucky this time FEDEX did not want to sell the last micro SD cards it was not showing up in the counter. Now, were you saying...?

Re:Already a flawed product.

[thegarbz]

The thing is, Kingston is a flash part manufacturer.

Keep telling yourself that.

Re:Already a flawed product.

[Coren22]

Homosexual connectors? Wouldn't a more appropriate comparison be to doggy style and missionary?

stress, either way

[magarity]

Heck, look at the size of the thing; looks like a great way to stress the socket when hanging off a desktop or stress the socket the opposite direction on any reasonably thin laptop as it props up the system.

Re:stress, either way

[blackest_k]

To be honest I don't think anyone is expected to buy it and use it!

If you look on Amazon they have a 512 GB version and a 1TB Version

512 GB = $296
1TB = $2700
2TB = ????

You can by a mac mini with 16gb ram a 2 TB fusion drive and i7 cpu for about â1700 why would you spend $1000 more on a flash drive.

Re:stress, either way

[Anonymous Coward]

They may report 1TB capacity.... buy you may only be able to store a few hundred MB (or even less) on them...

Re: stress, either way

[slazzy]

They are scams. They show up as 1Tb to the computer. Try actually copying a terrabyte of data they'll show errors.

Re:stress, either way

[l20502]

Are you saying a small box is going to stress a connector more than a cable hanging off or a dongle?
"any reasonably thin laptop" is probably going to require an hub/dongle to be useful anyway.
If you're really worried about stress bring back screw-on D-sub connectors!

Re: stress, either way

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

Or 2000 hours of 720p.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even more with H.265.

Why bother with 4K when this could store most of the movies and videos I've seen in the past ten years?

Re:Or 2000 hours of 720p.

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a 480p H265 movie once. Looked spectacular, for less than 1GB for over 2 hours of movie. But the idiot who made the file used a very low bit rate for sound, so I had to delete it. That's too bad : it played fine on a poor and underclocked CPU.
For audio, use the Opus codec at some mid rate or more please. 256 kbps AAC stereo might be fine, if you need to use an old inferior codec.

makes tea too

[Anonymous Coward]

Just add it to a cup of water with your favorite green tea, and watch it boil...though if it's USB 2.0 it will only be luke warm.

Shock resistance from what?

[Leslie43]

Falling out of an airplane, orbital re-entry? Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling off a desk.

How about improving the usb connector that always seems to get ripped off on this design or stopping the small all metal designs from overheating.

Re:Shock resistance from what?

[wbr1]

If it still works it is not overheating, you just don't like to touch it. I'd wager plastic designs get hotter chip temps.

Re:Shock resistance from what?

[dgatwood]

Falling out of an airplane, orbital re-entry? Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling off a desk.

Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling from an airplane, too. They're lightweight and have a decent amount of surface area for the weight. I keyed in some approximate weight and dimension values into a terminal velocity calculator and got an estimate of only 20 meters per second. This means it has only something like 4 joules of energy while falling at terminal velocity. The outside could be made of glass and it would likely survive without damage....

Re:Shock resistance from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon due to mod points.

This is why I read /. Someone ran the calculations on the terminal velocity of a flash drive. If that flash drive is full of every digital version of the original Star Wars trilogy (where Han shoots first) and pr0n, I think this is about the geekiest thing I can imagine.

I love this place!

Prices?

[31415926535897]

I'm guessing they're pretty expensive when they have to buy copy at places like this, but you forgot to tell us the prices in this advertisement.

Re:Prices?

[hambone142]

Googling about, the Kingston 1TB drive sells for $1,163. This one will be a whole lot more.

Re:Prices?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bought two for $5 on ebay last year!

You will cry when it dies a premature death

[n0w0rries]

Flash drives tend to die a short life if use them frequently. The ones with the USB ports that move usually fail more frequently. I'm not looking for a warranty, I'm looking for something built to last.

Re:You will cry when it dies a premature death

[dgatwood]

If you ignore the fact that the cable breaks, and that the cable hole is so small that a standard cable will wear its way through the aluminum in under a year, the XtremKey is what you're looking for. Mine is several years old and still works. Before I got that, I would go through a flash drive every two or three months.

Re:You will cry when it dies a premature death

[adolf]

I looked briefly at that.

For years, I kept a USB drive on my keychain. Various styles. Their mounting systems always inevitably failed, and this usually left me without one until I replaced it or it was returned to me (which HAS happened, though I always nuke the data and restore from backup upon its return).

The ExtremKey seems cool, but has some problems. One, the business-end -- where the data is -- unscrews and is then left to freely disappear. The tailcap is cast rather than machined (unlike any cheap Maglight, ever), lending extra opportunity to munge the threads with repeated use. The mounting hole is tiny, and has very little material supporting it (as you noted).

But the biggest problem: It's big, so I'll be inclined to keep this on my keychain, which I wear on my beltloop, making all of the above even larger issues.

My answer for the past couple of years has been cheap, thin drives from PNY. The body is the same size of a normal USB A connector shell except for a (useless) plastic loop that I always cut off with a knife or a file.

I keep it in my wallet. It's safe there, or at least as safe as tons of way-more-important-to-me things. It's shock-mounted, being wrapped in leather. And it tends to stay as dry as I do (not that water is generally an issue for these things). And even if it falls apart (ie: the PCB slides out of the metal housing), I'll have all of the parts neatly contained in my wallet for recovery and/or repair.

It's also big enough for decent heat dissipation for lengthy writes.

The last one I bought was $10-ish at Wal-Mart of all places, and I forget if it was 32 or 64GB (and it really doesn't matter: either is very cheap, I think). Amazon has them for about $15, prime.

Zero complaints.

Re:You will cry when it dies a premature death

[thegarbz]

Flash drives tend to die a short life if use them frequently.

Short life being defined as several years idle. Don't you have more relevant things to worry about?

Re:You will cry when it dies a premature death

[antdude]

No kidding. I had multiple USB(2-3) flash sticks that didn't last ong. 2 (PNY & SP) died from installing and booting mac OS Sierra v10.12 onto it. And then I had rarely used flash sticks that died too with basic copied files. Are there any reliable USB flash sticks that will work long at all? My old USB1 64 MB flash sticks still work today!

Oh hell naw.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the very rare times when I've ever needed to make that much data portable, a basic external hard drive that cost a fraction of the price was more than sufficient (and probably faster).

When the day comes where we routinely need to carry around files that are 100s of GB in size then we can talk. And on that day this thing better be in the $30 range.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the very rare times when I've ever needed to make that much data portable, a basic external hard drive that cost a fraction of the price was more than sufficient (and probably faster).

When the day comes where we routinely need to carry around files that are 100s of GB in size then we can talk. And on that day this thing better be in the $30 range.

I can't think of a valid use case either. This shows 2TB with a 2.5" external for $78.50. Work would be lucky if they bought the cheaper one. No one is going to care about the very slight convenience factor. The only advantage I see to this is you might be able to develop directly on one, assuming you need something portable, but again there are 2.5" or smaller solutions that are far cheaper and for large file storage a spinning disk counterpart is far cheaper.

If you had to move a lot of data from point a to point b, well it is unlikely that space is at such a premium. Frankly the only valid use I can think of such a thing might be a narrow use case where space or weight is extremely expensive, or a cable plus external drive just doesn't work. I.E. it may be cheaper to transport 2TB up like that to the ISS than other solutions.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[CRCulver]

I spent a lot of the year bicycle touring or backpacking, where one counts every gram of weight. I take my entire music collection, which is just over 1TB in size, with me on a portable hard drive, but a USB stick that is lighter and more shock-resistant (no moving parts) would be nice. No way I'd ever pay the prices set for these ultra-high-capacity USB sticks, though.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[fnj]

You can buy a good quality 1TB SSD for $280 - much cheaper, faster, and incomparably better endurance than this thing. It'll be a little lighter and much more shock resistant and reliable than your hard drive for not a hell of a lot more $. You'll need an external USB-to-SATA enclosure, but you can get those cheap.

And, yeah, 2TB is also available for an even better $/GB.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[jabuzz]

Hum, 1TB of FLAC from ripped CD's is over 2000 albums. At 320kbps MP3 it would be over 10000 albums, and if your bicycle touring or backpacking then frankly 320kbps MP3 is just fine and dandy.

I think people have very little idea how little space music actually takes once compressed even losslessly in comparison to modern storage capacities.

As such I call bullshit.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[CRCulver]

Indeed, my music collection is all FLACs, as well as full DVD or Bluray images for video content. Of course, on the road MP3 quality (and its equivalents for video) might suffice, but why bother re-encoding when I can just carry it all? Plus, I keep scores and books on the respective composer or musician in the same directory tree, and some of those image-heavy PDFs can really add up.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[Anonymous Coward]

If every gram counts, there's seriously no reason for carrying around an actual HDD. You do not need 1TB of music with you while biking. Even if it's all FLAC, you could play it for months and never listen to the same thing twice.

Re:Oh hell naw.

[CRCulver]

We live in an age where a person can take their entire media collection with them. If I suddenly remember a piece I haven't heard in years, I can play it straightaway, even if Iâ(TM)m sitting in a tent in Patagonia. You act like thereâ(TM)s something wrong with taking advantage of that possibility. And while every gram counts in the sense that I would happily go from a hard drive to a high-capacity USB stick if the price were right, the hard drive itself is still acceptable enough for travel.

Way too expensive for serious consideration

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had a 2TB micro SD card I would be impressed by that. It would probably be worth the asking price to someone.

As a USB stick? You could make one way cheaper in about the same form factor by getting a multi-port SD reader and sticking multiple cards in it.

Pocket secrets.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate GT 2TB Is World's Largest Capacity Flash Drive

Just think of what Edward Snowden could have walked away with with a couple of these?

the jig is up, slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

we know now what your new year's resolution was....

more slashvertisements.

Obligatory adolescent joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey babe, is that a 2TB flash drive in your pocket or are you just glad to see me.

But, It's kingston

[Anonymous Coward]

So it most likely is limited to something ridiculous like 5MB/s read/writes.
I've had a few "data traveler" drives from them, varying from 8 to 32GB in size, none of them ever got more than 10MB/s in write speed.
So writing 2 TB at that speed would take a LONG time. You're better off just carrying an external SSD drive.

But the real question is:

[fbobraga]

it will run linux?!

I Bought Three Of Them

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they're...

The Kingston Trio!

Blarney Stone

[Anonymous Coward]

The ideal product if you need to bring data home from the NSA.

obligatory

[eaglesrule]

Kingston, the company caught doing a bait and switch with components is still in business? That's a shame.