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Technology Lifestyle 32Gb USB Flash drive on sale, 64Gb soon too
Technology Lifestyle 32Gb USB Flash drive on sale, 64Gb soon too | 32Gb USB Flash drive on sale, 64Gb soon too |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 23 October 2006 | |
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Page 2 of 3 The Kanguru Flash Max line comes with security software that even allows password protection of different partitions on the drive. But a range of features found on competing USB drives (at smaller sizes) show what we can expect from other manufacturers when they release their versions. Featured Whitepaper
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So, how soon before 128Gb, 256Gb, 512Gb and one terabyte of flash on a stick or memory card? Maybe not until 2010. But at the pace of today’s change, you just never know. We could have multiple terabytes of data to hand on flash drives, while hard drives are definitely moving in a much bigger direction, too. Quite possibly by Christmas 2008, we’ll see flash drives in computers really start to replace hard drives in larger numbers, but that might be optimistic. For now, hard drive manufacturers like Samsung and Seagate are making moves to include at least 1Gb of flash memory in a range of new hard drives so that they deliver information to you faster than ever, using the 1Gb as a cache area for often-accessed files. Windows Vista users who plug a USB flash drive into their computers today can already take advantage of a similar feature called ‘ReadyBoost’, giving Vista users excellent reason to buy a high-speed memory card that matches the size of RAM on their computers and leaving it permanently plugged into their computers. Notebook users might find using the memory card socket with a suitable sized card preferable to having a USB stick permanently plugged in, which would also be permanently sticking out. Samsung and Fujitsu are also shipping very selected models of notebook computer with flash hard drives already. But at their recommended retail prices, they're much more expensive than their hard drive brethren, as you can tell from the price of the 16 and 32Gb USB sticks alone. You do get longer battery life by using a flash drive, but flash drives also have a problem with read/write cycles. Depending on the drive, they can stop working (i.e. no reading or writing) from 10,000 to 100,000 cycles - it all really depends on the quality of memory used in the manufacture of the USB stick. So it's good to discover that Kanguru's Flash Max Drive has a much more impressive read/write figure - the first time I've seen it so high... |
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