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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.
everywhere you go
Imagine the horror when you're overseas, no access to cheap data and you have run out of porn to watch
... To lose EVERYTHING at once!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
USB-A 3.1 and USB-C 3.1 is the same speed.
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 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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
it will run linux?!
Kingston, the company caught doing a bait and switch with components is still in business? That's a shame.
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:
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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...?
The thing is, Kingston is a flash part manufacturer.
Keep telling yourself that.
Homosexual connectors? Wouldn't a more appropriate comparison be to doggy style and missionary?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?