To me it's kinda stupid to release these things without USB 3.0 spec. How long is it going to take to load this to capacity, or pull all of your data off once loaded? Once USB 3.0 is widely available I'll start being interested in USB flash drives with capacities over 8GB.

Same here, my first thought was no way am I going to spend that kinda money right before USB 3 is released.

USB3 does not help a lot if the memory is slow as in this case... But yeah... any memorydevice this big needs more speed!

^+1


Also can some one fix the glitch in this comment thing? I can't read/see what I am typing.

As hannibal pointed out having theoretical bandwidth is nice, but unless devices use the bandwidth it doesn't matter. Much like SATA 3gb is pointless since hard drives don't usually saturate the basic level of SATA.

USB 3 is going to be another nice marketing tool. It will do nothing for many devices, and yet a great majority will pay a premium for the higher number.

The only use for this is an environment where you don't have network access but need to transfer multiple GB of files. This happened where I used to work where a lab was isolated from the company network, but we needed to load multiple-GB builds onto the hardware. Add onto that the fact that we needed multiple builds for different situations, and transferring that kind of data any other way was unfeasible. And no, eSATA wasn't an option. Yeah, it will be nicer with USB3, but the need for lots of storage and the USB protocol is here today, maybe just not as much of a daily user as most people would like.

flash is too slow for usb3.0
though, this is also of great use for people using nettops where downloaded files transferred to the usb device.

might be handy to have all my stuff backed up on just 1 usb device, being updates, programs and my own personal stuff in case of a reformat. Although having a transfer speed of .7 mps to 12 (the more files it sees it has to copy the slower for some reason) i wouldnt really be looking forward to being forced to having to watch 2 movies if you know what I mean. For that price I could just get a solid state disk then use mine as storage =D

lol@ USB stick tech support.


i wish they had gone with the USB 3.0 spec though, even though it would never attain the top speed. just for future proofing, though.

I agree with the backup of data just in case of a reformat; I have a lot of programs/drivers/updates that I wouldn't mind moving to something like this; it might take a while; but that's why they invented something that can speed up the process of time; beer.

I'm confused as to why people think USB 2 isn't going to help flash drives. Right now flash maxes out USB 2 at around 30-35mb a second, after the USB cap is raised faster transfer times will come very quickly. My guess is it will be much like an internally connected drive as far as transfer rates are concerned.

Also just because it holds a lot doesn't mean everyone is going to be transfering EVERYTHING off at once. I myself use flash drives to hold PC images and use it as a boot device to stage PCs.

err I mean "m confused as to why people think USB 3"

USB 2.0 has a maximum bandwidth of 480Mbit/s (60MB/s).
Curent flash memory has a read speed of about 320Mbit/s (40MB/s) and a write speed of about 160Mbit/s (20MB/s). Until the actual speed of the flash memory increases, the higher bandwidth of USB 3.0 will be wasted.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/arc [...] 01corp.htm

When ^^ is the standard for flash it will ke advanage of 3.0.