32Gb USB Flash drive on sale, 64Gb soon too

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 23 October 2006 14:13

Your IT - Entertainment

So, while some people are discovering their well used memory cards and flash drives no longer work, flash manufacturers are working on ways to mitigate this problem in the future, and Kanguru have some impressive stats to back up the lifespan of the Flash Max Drive range.

Kanguru quotes a much higher 1,000,000 times read/write cycle using top grade flash memory (known as NAND), while the quote data retention life is 10 years. Read speeds are quoted at 9mb per second, white write speeds are 5mb per second. Other, smaller USB flash drives do have much faster read/write speeds, but not the pure size of 32Gb.

Having faster speeds on this kind of drive would definitely be an advantage, but it would come at a cost that would see this drive even more expensive than it is. Time, larger capacities and simple economics will the price come down soon enough.

To end, we can’t leave without a quick update on hard drive technology. As earlier alluded, hard drives manufacturers are not only embracing flash memory, they’re also working hard to create huge hard drives for the near future to compete with all these advances in flash technology.

Within the 2009 timeframe (possibly stretching in 2010), Seagate expects to be able to introduce:

- 40GB sizes for 1-inch consumer electronics drives (currently at 8Gb commercially), with 1-inch drives used in phones, small mp3/media players, GPS maps that could hold all the mapping data for the entire plane, future versions of the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS

 

- 275GB for 1.8inch consumer electronics drives currently used in iPods, other mp3/video players and other consumer electronics devices that don't need to be as small as 1-inch hard drives allow.

- 500GB for 2.5-inch notebook drives, more than double the size of 200Gb 2.5” hard drives only recently announced by Toshiba. Futjistu promises their 200Gb hard drives will arrive in 2007, I'm sure Seagate has plans to introduce them in 2007 as well. We now know they expect 500Gb for 2009.

- Nearly 2.5TB for 3.5-inch desktop and enterprise class drives – the largest single hard drive today is from Seagate and is 'only' 750Gb in comparison, massive though 750Gb is today.

At 2.5TB capacity, a hard drive would be capable of storing 41,650 hours of music, 800,000 digital photographs, 4,000 hours of digital video or 1,250 video games.

The war between flash and hard drives is in full swing, with multi-terabyte sizes at consumer prices on the way in three or four years, with today's devices available at what are in today's terms, incredibly big sizes. And we've more data, documents, photos, videos, music files and more stuff than ever to store in the age of broadband and digital media.

If only we could similarly quicken the pace of advanced battery technologies so they would power our notebooks for a week and our mobile phones for a month or longer before needing a recharge...