You probably have a flash drive – everybody does. It’s likely an 8 or 16GB flash drive for the storage of documents, maybe a few videos and other odds and ends. Kingston, one of the major players in the flash drive business, thinks it’s about time the flash drive starts holding more data – a lot more.
Kingston announced at CES 2013 that it intends to bring a 512GB and a 1TB flash drive to market early this year. It’s called the DataTraveler HyperX Predator, and it sports a USB 3.0 input with read/write speeds up to 240MB/s and 160MB/s respectively. All in all, it’s extraordinarily impressive, if a little unnecessary.
“Our new DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 allows users to store their entire digital world on a portable USB 3.0 Flash drive,” said Andrew Ewing, Flash memory business manager, Kingston. “The large capacity and fast USB 3.0 transfer speeds allow users to save time as they can access, edit and transfer applications or files such as HD movies directly from the drive without any performance lag.”
If you find yourself in the market for a 512GB flash drive, Kingston is now selling them for $1,750 per drive. The company isn’t selling the 1TB flash drive, but it will be available later in Q1 for an unknown price. It’s expected to be ridiculously expensive.
For those who find the above options a bit too rich for them, Kingston will be offering smaller USB 3.0 flash drives with smaller read/write speeds of 150MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. These flash drives will be offered in 32GB and 64GB variations. There’s no price mentioned just yet, but it should be much cheaper.