Transcend Shoehorns 2TB of Storage Capacity into USB 3.0 Thumbstick
Transcend Shoehorns 2TB of Storage Capacity into USB 3.0 Thumbstick
Posted 08/30/2011 at 7:58am
| by Paul Lilly
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We don't know if Transcend is dabbling in voodoo these days or what's going, but somehow the company figured out a way to cram 2TB of storage into a container that's about the length of a USB thumb drive and only slightly thicker than a penny. Some of the credit also goes to Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), which co-developed the 'Thin Card' device.
Information about the drive that's puny in stature and massive in storage capacity is in short supply, though NetbookNews.com shot a short video of the SuperSpeed USB stick being shown off at Display Taiwan. In it, the representative shows off a 16GB model, which she says will be the smallest capacity available. Whatever technology is at work, she claims it will ramp up to 2TB in the same form factor.
No word on when something like this might make it to market or for how much, but assuming Transcend isn't blowing smoke up everyone's backside, this is a potential game changer in both portable storage and perhaps solid state drive design. The tricky party will be in making 2TB of flash storage affordable, or at least not obscene.
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aarcane
August 30, 2011 at 3:42pm
Thanks for getting my hopes up. I wanted to replace my USB bootable netbook's harddrive with one of these.
andrewc513
August 30, 2011 at 3:34pm
Misleading title, borderline lying. This is years away, the 2TB claim just means that the spec allows for a theoretical size of 2TB down the road.
schwit
August 30, 2011 at 10:14am
Spam. "Whatever technology is at work, she claims it will ramp up to 2TB in the same form factor."
Claims? When will this happen, 5 years?
bloodgain
August 30, 2011 at 9:22am
OK, so now all that's left is to shrink the processor, memory, and video card to this size, and we can all carry our gaming rigs in our pockets. Better start adding a magnifying glass and tweezers to our DIY computer build kits :-)
Marthian
August 30, 2011 at 10:46am
That seems impractical considering that's what they are essentially doing with Tablets and such (sure you could fit your rig in your pocket, but what about your keyboard or mouse? I'm not using a Tablet for gaming, 3D processing, or typing long documents any time soon.)
Also if we were to shrink said items, it would probably be better to then create bigger and more powerful versions of them considering fitting that much power in a smaller space.
win7fanboi
August 30, 2011 at 9:19am
nice... like I tell folks on those deal sites, forget the firesale on the usb 2.0 thumb drives. Its not fun moving more than 8gb of data at usb 2 speed. No need to put yourself through that now that usb 3 is out. Hopefully this will drive the prices down for 32GB+ usb 3 thumb drives.
ChatterboxChuck
August 30, 2011 at 8:11am
This would be better than a back up. If Windows 8 is being designed to be portable, imagine carrying not only Windows 8 but your entire hard drive with every software (utilities, games, Office, etc) installed plus any music, video and image files all in a keychain sized drive that you can connect to any computer and use the OS of your choice as oppose to the alternative. That would be awesome.
win7fanboi
August 30, 2011 at 9:21am
I wouldn't hold my breath. For it to be be portable it would need to be hardware independent. Plus you can already do this with linux distros like ubuntu, etc.
bloodgain
August 30, 2011 at 9:31am
I can think of several ways to pull it off, but the best solutions would assume that either Windows 8 or some "Windows base loader" already exists on the host machine. It could even be written to be installed over Windows 7/Vista and maybe XP without affecting their operation much. Think of it as something between a boot loader and a virtual machine, but less "virtual," since there's really just some core support being offloaded to a separate sub-kernel.
That's just one solution. There are other solutions, though some would come with a hit to performance. The theory is there, and a lot of the code exists. Microsoft would just have to decide to implement it. Maybe in Windows 9 ;-)
Neufeldt2002
August 30, 2011 at 8:07am
That would be awesome for a backup drive. You could go anywhere and have all your data at your finger tips.
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