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Data Storage Hardware

Kingston Introduces 1TB Flash Drive 170

Deathspawner writes "If there's one thing that each CES can bring, it's a handful or products that manage to drop jaws everywhere. Kingston's latest flash drive series, DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, manages to be one of those. It's aimed at folks who actually need mass storage on the go at speeds that mechanical hard drives cannot offer. Available soon will be a 512GB model, followed by the 1TB later this quarter. The drive features read speeds of 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s — not quite desktop SSD speeds, but much faster than a mechanical hard drive, and with vastly reduced latencies due to it being flash storage. Not surprisingly, pricing has not yet been discussed."
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Kingston Introduces 1TB Flash Drive

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:22PM (#42511089)

    porn collection in your pocket or ...

  • prices (Score:4, Informative)

    by xorbe ( 249648 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:22PM (#42511093)

    Somewhere I saw ~900 Eur for the 512GB model, which is nearly USD$1200

    • Re:prices (Score:5, Insightful)

      by loufoque ( 1400831 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:51PM (#42511557)

      You mean $800.
      Remember, Europe gets fucked pretty badly when it comes to prices of electronic goods.

      • Euro is worth more than the dollar, something around 1.3
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Well he's saying that a USD$800 gadget in the USA goes for EUR800 across the pond, despite the exchange rate.

        • Re:prices (Score:4, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07, 2013 @07:23PM (#42512595)

          Woosh! What he meant was that even if it was 900 EUR which would be more than 900 USD, the price in EUR is usually higher than the price in USD. Same goes for AUD. Games are twice as more expensive in Australia because even if the AUD has caught up with the USD, the numbers in the prices haven't changed so what's 30 USD costs 60 AUD even if AUD > USD.

      • nuts posted this in the wrong place, and once more from the top:

        Do they? I think you may be thinking of Australia there...

      • by fgouget ( 925644 )

        You mean $800. Remember, Europe gets fucked pretty badly when it comes to prices of electronic goods.

        One thing to remember is that usually you're comparing $800+VAT to 900€ with VAT-included, where the VAT can be as high as 19.6%. I'm not saying this explains it all, far from it, but it's a factor.

        • 19.6 is the current maximum VAT rate in France (which is going to increase soon). In any case it's not the highest VAT rate in Europe, which is 25% (Denmark).

    • Current prices of a 500GB SSD are going to run you right around $380 to $600 right now depending on who manufacturer and where you buy it. This is a tad less than half the size with the same amount of space so I'm not terribly surprised. I would peg the 1TB version of this being around $2000 give or take
    • Do they? I think you may be thinking of Australia there...

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      Here's a decent 480GB SSD: http://www.ebuyer.com/284750-ocz-480gb-agilitry-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-480g [ebuyer.com]

      It now costs 347.64 pounds ($557.55) but I recently paid 290 pounds ($465) for it! So you can get really decent-sized quality SSDs if you shop around.

  • by iYk6 ( 1425255 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:29PM (#42511179)

    DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0

    I laughed for about half a minute at that name. Next year: Mega Terminator X-treme 5x5!!!

  • by ganjadude ( 952775 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:29PM (#42511185) Homepage
    According to Engadget it is not something we are all going to bring to work day to day just yet

    If you're interested in snagging one of the top two units, be advised that the price of the 512GB edition is a staggering $1,750.00 -- so you'd better get working on impressing that MLB scout next time they're passing by.

    http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/kingston-1tb-flash-drive/ [engadget.com]

    • Maybe they're making these for movie execs who need to carry the movies they made a profit from on their keys? I guess that's a market, right?
    • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:41PM (#42511371) Homepage Journal

      According to Engadget it is not something we are all going to bring to work day to day just yet

      If you're interested in snagging one of the top two units, be advised that the price of the 512GB edition is a staggering $1,750.00 -- so you'd better get working on impressing that MLB scout next time they're passing by.

      http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/kingston-1tb-flash-drive/ [engadget.com]

      And in three years they'll be selling them at the office supply store for $30.

      Ain't the relentless march of tenchological innovation wunnerful?

      • oh exactly, Does anyone remember what a 10 meg hard drive cost in say 87?
        • by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Around 1990, I paid $400 for a 40MB MFM drive.

          • I remember upgrading my PC back around 94.

            $250 to move from a 33MHz processor to 66MHz.
            $250 to double the RAM to 8MB.

          • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

            Around 1990, I paid $400 for a 40MB MFM drive.

            Dude! By 1990 everyone was moving to RLL!

            Ah, and we once had a stack of old Byte magazines on a shelf in the corner, I leafed through a few for a good laugh. 1980 a 5 MB drive cost $2500, a 10 MB drive cost about $4000.

      • by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

        If the technology came down in price (say to $100-$200), where this would shine would be a possible successor to tape drives. Since Flash drives can be made in almost any shape, creating a form factor that is made to be used in a robot silo with highly dense packing of the drives would be easily doable. Combine that with the second that the media is mounted, I/O can start happening (unlike tapes which require the drive to physically grab the media and swish it past the heads.) Shoe-shining would be a thi

    • Why wouldnt you just get an SSD thats nearly the same size, and about 3 times faster? There are USB-to-SATA docks that are tiny and only about $20.

      • by fnj ( 64210 )

        Convenience. Who wants to drag around all that kit?

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        The SSD requires power. You can't just plug it into an OTG cable and turn your Android phone into the ultimate Archos replacement.

        Plus "nearly the same size" just isn't good enough if you actually care about capacity. It's kind of like being almost pregnant. Your device is either big enough or not. "There is no try".

    • by Dahamma ( 304068 )

      Wow, that makes the $1300 Apple charges to upgrade from 128GB to 768GB SSD on their Macbook Pro seem reasonable...

  • by WankerWeasel ( 875277 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:32PM (#42511239)
    They've offered a Swiss Army knife with a 1TB drive for over a year now.
  • by Nrrqshrr ( 1879148 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:34PM (#42511277)
    As a guy with several computers and with the most recent one boasting a mere 100ish GB space (I never really needed more). I have always been curious about something, my own drives cause me quite a lot of time wasted on defragmentation, otherwise I would get meet those pesky bottlenecks way too often for my taste. So I wondered how that much space, 1 TB or more could affect defragmentation. I mean by that, would a regular 1 TB drive start bottlenecking at the same point (of frequency of use and space usage) as a mere 100 GB drive, or does the added space add to the "tolerance" of such a drive?
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Alter_3d ( 948458 )
      Defragmentation doesnt affect flash drives, or SSDs. They access data randomly, not sequentially like a HDD
      • Erases on flash are still sequential, at least to the extent that all the sectors in an erase block must be copied to another sector before any of the sectors can be modified.
        • We're talking about NAND flash devices here. A block in any flash device is the minimum unit of erase bytes/words. Typically, the higher the density, the larger the blocks - so that there ain't too much of address decoding logic.

          When a block is erased, all that is needed is that the pages within that block that need writing need to be programmed (i.e. 0xffffs changed to combinations of 0s and 1s.) Once all pages within a block are written, the block cannot be updated without being erased again.

          Howeve

          • by tepples ( 727027 )

            Typically, the higher the density, the larger the blocks - so that there ain't too much of address decoding logic.

            Which means these blocks end up much larger than the clusters used by a typical file system. If a file system is fragmented, then a file will be spread across multiple blocks, and multiple files will be within each block. And if a file spread across multiple blocks that themselves contain other files is changed, all these blocks will need to be erased and reprogrammed. (From the point of view of the flash device, it's as if the file system is performing an extreme form of tail merging [wikipedia.org].) So yes, it helps if

    • Wrong question and depends on your usage pattern. A 1TB HDD is almost certainly going to have hardware improvements and perform better than your 100GB, fragmented or not.

      The drive in TFA is a SSD, not a HDD, though and never requires defragmentation because it isn't slowed down by fragmentation.

      • by Dahamma ( 304068 )

        Actually, the drive is Flash USB, not a (SATA) SSD. But in any case, fragmentation can definitely slow down flash drives - and can be even worse than an HDD on writes. Look it up...

  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday January 07, 2013 @05:38PM (#42511333) Homepage Journal

    8GB drives were something to salivate over, because you could store an entire DVD on it.

    Now these things are so commonplace I have them littering my desk, giveaways from tradeshows, vendors, etc. You can get them in amusing shapes of Taz, Hello Kitty or Dora the Explorer at the office store.

    Finally dipping my toe in the water with an SSD for the desktop machine. It's been running for years on a pair of Seagate 160GB SATA I drives, which are near capacity. I thought about buying a couple of 1.5 TB drives, but reviews are very dismal on mechanical storage drives now. Seems a lot of old manufacturers are being bought up by Seagate and Seagate and Western Digital will soon be the only players left in a "buggy whip" market. Hard to beat the GB/$ deal with hard drives, but with 1 year warranties and a lot of DOA deliveries, plus quite a lot of drives which seem to die within the first year, I'm not super inclined to put my valuable files on them.

    Here's hoping by the end of the 2013 we have some good prices on high capacity SSDs and In can move my photos, videos and miscellaneous crap onto new drives.

    • Hard to beat the GB/$ deal with hard drives, but with 1 year warranties and a lot of DOA deliveries, plus quite a lot of drives which seem to die within the first year, I'm not super inclined to put my valuable files on them.

      IMHO, the current way to go is big old spinning disks configured as RAID on a NAS for bulk storage, and SSD for PC/Laptop/etc drives. Your valuable files are safe enough and you get great OS performance without breaking the bank on big SSDs...

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I think the only people to care enough to write reviews on mechanical drives these days are those with a bad story to tell because there's absolutely nothing exciting to say. Nobody cares about performance anymore because SSDs has spanked them every which way but they're cheap, big and they work, sure you could get a lemon but I'd take backups of that SSD too. I think your chances of a broken drive was much higher back when they had new tech and doubled in capacity every two years.

      • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

        I think the only people to care enough to write reviews on mechanical drives these days are those with a bad story to tell because there's absolutely nothing exciting to say. Nobody cares about performance anymore because SSDs has spanked them every which way but they're cheap, big and they work, sure you could get a lemon but I'd take backups of that SSD too. I think your chances of a broken drive was much higher back when they had new tech and doubled in capacity every two years.

        Approximately 50% of respondents mentioned the drives worked and the were mostly happy, aside from quite a lot of drive noise. ~25% remarked their drives worked for a while. About 15% mentioned at least 1 DOA arriving in their order, whether it was the only one or one or two out of a few or several.

        Not quite the expceptions. I've dealt with RMAs before, but the concept of spending a day moving frome one drive to anther and then having it die isn't very attractive. A RAID is the only way I'll go with har

        • by adolf ( 21054 )

          I've got spinny-disks in all of my machines at home (for a total of...about 12 drives, at the moment spinning 24x7, not including game consoles). The drives get changed out every now and then, but not because they're broken -- instead, it's just because the old drives are small/slow and I've happened across a substantially larger/faster drive for little/no money.

          I've been doing it this way for more than 20 years.

          In my personal use, it has been over a decade since I had a hard drive die without an obvious e

    • SSD for booting and apps and mechanical drive for media is the way to go
    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      My father/dad/pa has a bunch of old USB flash drives, memory cards, etc. They ranged from 16 MB (MEGA Bytes) to 1 GB. I wonder what to do with all them. Can I RAID? Hehe.

      • You could software RAID them, but you'll have 16MB "disks" since you have to go with the smallest size. You could break convention and split up the 1GB drive into 16MB partitions for the software RAID, but you'd be better off with JBOD with all those differently sized drives.
        • by antdude ( 79039 )

          Oh, you can't use different sizes of each drive as a single drive? Darn. I read that USB2 is slow and doesn't do well. :( Sheesh.

  • I bought a 512GB SSD for $400-ish. It's about time somebody stuffed that kind of drive into a USB stick. It should have mass market appeal so the volume should be much higher than regular SSDs.

    • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      I bought a 512GB SSD for $400-ish. It's about time somebody stuffed that kind of drive into a USB stick. It should have mass market appeal so the volume should be much higher than regular SSDs.

      Dennis Nedry called, he's got the complete mapped DNA of all the dinosaurs for you. He'll be delivering them as soon as he gets his car out of the mud.

      • Holy crap, not only did someone make a Jurassic Park reference, but I got it without having to look it up.

        You realize it's been twenty freaking years since that movie came out? I remember playing the theme song in my high school band. Sometimes I look at the guy in the mirror and wonder where the wrinkles and gray hair came from.

        Then my nine-year-old daughter asks me to get out of the bathroom so she can do her hair before she goes to her mom's house.

        "Oh, right."

        • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

          Holy crap, not only did someone make a Jurassic Park reference, but I got it without having to look it up.

          You realize it's been twenty freaking years since that movie came out? I remember playing the theme song in my high school band. Sometimes I look at the guy in the mirror and wonder where the wrinkles and gray hair came from.

          Then my nine-year-old daughter asks me to get out of the bathroom so she can do her hair before she goes to her mom's house.

          "Oh, right."

          Yeah. And I remember reading the book, at 3 AM with my heart pounding so hard in my chest that it hurt. Michael Crichton was a hell of a suspense writer -- too bad so little of it survived into the film. Steven Spielberg can be terribly overrated at times.

          So any day now someone's going to do it. Clone a mammoth or something. Count on it.

      • by Zaatxe ( 939368 )
        I don't know how much memory the complete mapping of dino's DNA take, but for human genome, you need about 750 megabytes, uncompressed.
    • for that same $400 you spent, I was able to get a 60GB SSD for my desktop, and a diskless gigabit NAS drive with a pair of 3TB mechanical drives.....

      SSD's are nowhere near cheap enough to use for mass storage. They're fine for installing your OS on, but if you're archiving large amounts of data (say a BluRay/DVD collection, or a CD collection in FLAC) they're overkill.

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        > for that same $400 you spent, I was able to get a 60GB SSD for my desktop, and a diskless gigabit NAS drive with a pair of 3TB mechanical drives.....

        Yet none of that is terribly portable.

        It's a flash drive. You're not just paying for the capacity.

      • for that same $400 you spent, I was able to get a 60GB SSD for my desktop, and a diskless gigabit NAS drive with a pair of 3TB mechanical drives.....

        Really? Where? I saw 3 TB drives in the Fry's ad over the weekend for $129. 2x would be $258.. Oh, ok, I guess you may be right.. NAS enclosures are around $100 nowadays for 2 drive ones, right?

        Still, more info about the specifics you got would be useful, maybe the 3 TB drives were cheaper than I saw.

        • WD Caviar Green 3TB were on sale at NewEgg over the xmas holiday, and could have been picked up for $120... the price has gone up to $150 for them though. I'm sure if you shop around you can find different drives for less, or you could get 2.5TB or 2TB drives to make the budget. The point wasn't so much about building a 6TB NAS device for that price as it was that SSD's are *way* overpriced when it comes to large amounts of storage. :)

          Ultimately, it was slightly fudging the numbers. If you shopped around an

      • I bought the SSD to build large projects. My 128GB had become too small.

    • Talking about USB, is this new drive one that can be accessed in 'superspeed' mode in USB3? Like the 10Gb/s being discussed yesterday?
  • I got 8 64GB Kingston DataTraveler drives.

    100% failure within one year, with minimal usage. None of the drive were ever more than half full.

  • "Klingon Introduces 1TB Flash Drive"... Instantly confirming my suspicion that Star Trek was an elaborate enculturation ploy -- why else would we be porting our holiday carols, plays and other cultural events--- Then I read it again, made a prolonged sad face, and went to make more coffee.

"All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin" -- They Might Be Giants

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