64GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive

[Pebb]

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/29/buslinks-64gb-usb-2-0-flash-drive-pro-2-series/

And its no joke, saw this early on today guys. And if you look on some shops, you can buy it now.

 

[Shannon]

$5,000?

I'd rather just buy another harddrive (or 20).

 

[amp88]

Cool idea, far too expensive at the moment though (obviously). I'd rather have a bus-powered USB2.0 laptop hard drive.

edit: Like this (not attempting to advertise, just to explain what I mean).

edit2: The biggest drive on the Buslink website is 16GB, not 64GB. Maybe it was an April Fools joke as the article alludes to.

 

[Pebb]

But illegal hackers will love the sizes of these flash drives lol.

 

[amp88]

But illegal hackers will love the sizes of these flash drives lol.

Well, hackers don't have a need for storage space. If a hacker is hacking a system to gain information it needs to be transferrable in a small amount of time.

I assume you mean pirates (people who download copyrighted material), in which case, anyone who downloads movies/music free would much rather pay £100 for a 250GB hard drive (or £150 for a 400GB drive) than pay several thousand for a much smaller capacity, much slower USB flash drive.

Not that I'm condoning piracy or discussing how to acquire or distribute copyrighted works.

 

[Vasco]

Should have made it firewire? How long would it take to get 64gb of data onto something through USB 2.0?

 

[Shannon]

Well, that depends. IEEE 1394a (Firewire-400) has a max transfer speed of 400Mbps (bet you never would have guessed that!). USB 2.0 has a max transfer speed of 450Mbps. However, IEEE 1394b (Firewire-800) has a max transfer speed of 800Mbps. But, I think it's only Apple hardware that supports Firewire-800 (after all, they did invent Firewire). My motherboard, MSI K8N Neo-4 Platinum, isn't all that old and only supports Firewire-400.

So, in the end it makes more sense to go with USB 2.0.

 

[amp88]

Well, that depends. IEEE 1394a (Firewire-400) has a max transfer speed of 400Mbps (bet you never would have guessed that!). USB 2.0 has a max transfer speed of 450Mbps. However, IEEE 1394b (Firewire-800) has a max transfer speed of 800Mbps. But, I think it's only Apple hardware that supports Firewire-800 (after all, they did invent Firewire). My motherboard, MSI K8N Neo-4 Platinum, isn't all that old and only supports Firewire-400.

So, in the end it makes more sense to go with USB 2.0.

It's actually 480Mbps for USB2.0 but on the manufacturer's website they claim a maximum read speed of 20MBps and a maximum write speed of 15MBps for the 16GB drive.

I imagine you'd be unlikely to attain those speeds in general usage (overheads and speed of other components in the chain (e.g. hard drives limited to ~ 100Mbps)), so if you limit the transfer speed to a maximum of 85Mbps (an approximate average transfer rate of an ATA100 hard drive), and call the actual capacity of the 64GB flash drive approx 60GBs, it'd take about an hour and a half to read or write the full capacity of the flash drive.

The USB2.0 protocol on its own is very fast, with high (theoretical) maximum transfer rates. In practice, the transfer speeds depend on the hardware connected at each end, but I fairly regularly burn DVDs at 12X (max of approx 16MBps) from my USB2.0 external hard drive enclosure.

edit: Mistake in ATA transfer rate.

 

[toyomatt84]

Quite an inventive piece of hardware, albeit it's out of my budget, I'm still intriqued.