Kanguru's 64GB Flash Drive Max, only $2,800

If that $5,000 BUSlink 64GB flash drive was too rich for ya, then check out the firesale prices over at Kanguru. Their 64GB KMFDM series USB 2.0 Flash Drive Max drops April 15 for a mere, $2,800. The drives come packed in silver or black aluminum and boast a 9MB/sec read and 5MB/sec write speeds. If you can't foot the three large, then Kanguru is also offering 32GB and 16GB models for $1,500 and $800, respectively. Tell us though, are you really going to let this thing dangle off your head stump from that included neck strap?

[Thanks, Darnell]

[Tony @ Apr 7th 2006 8:34AM]

No offense. I'd love a 64GB UFD, but when the size gets that large, shouldn't they atleast make the device somewhat fast? 9MB/sec? That's SLOW! OCZ and ATP make them around 25MB/sec.

[Germ @ Apr 7th 2006 8:41AM]

Right #1. They have to make the thing fast. But, a 64 GB thumb drive!! Amazing!!! Get me three of 'em!

[Justin @ Apr 30th 2008 10:28PM]

I would rather buy 2 32 gig flash drives because if something happen to it you out all of you data and $2,800 bucks.

[trovster @ Apr 7th 2006 8:49AM]

For that price you can buy a fully fledged laptop, with a bigger HDD!

[Xaq Fixx @ Apr 7th 2006 8:50AM]

I need a KMFDM Drive it is "better than the best, megalomaniacal and harder than the rest."

[OddManOut @ Apr 7th 2006 9:04AM]

"For that price you can buy a fully fledged laptop, with a bigger HDD!"

Yeah, you'd probably never loose your keys with a 15" TFT laptop as a fob, unless you DO want to hang it from your neck, in which case I suggest a Mebius, a Libretto, or a good chiropractor.

But sweet Jesus, put even 32 of those deliciously tiny gigs and that ultra small Sharp wifi chipset in a Zaurus C-XXXX and oh...Oh...OH!

I need a towel...

[DIJ @ Apr 7th 2006 9:20AM]

I'm amazed at how small it is, but like #1 said, it's just too slow.

[Zero1 @ Apr 7th 2006 9:29AM]

It may be slow and expensive now, but as capacities this large become more mainstream prices will indeed drop and they should become faster.

I still have one of the 'first' commercial 128MB flash drives, and its not particularly fast and it cost a lot for back then.

[pattyboi @ Apr 7th 2006 9:29AM]

I think it more impressive that a 16GB flash drive cost only $800. That's less than the cost of 4 4GB drives. Prices should be half or a quarter of this by next year, whenever those big honkin Samsung NAND chips start seeing some use.

[Paris Hilton @ Apr 7th 2006 9:35AM]

I have five of these for all my videos.

[Andy Gale @ Apr 7th 2006 9:57AM]

Seriously though, who would use this? What motivation for laying out $1500 on a flash drive could anyone have?

[ironguy @ Apr 7th 2006 10:10AM]

Although a bit slow, you could place an entire PC on the thing and take it with you. Imagine going to any PC, pop in your drive, boot to it, and have ALL your own programs, pics, music, etc.

[Glyn @ Apr 7th 2006 10:27AM]

Could they be used in Vista? I remember reading somewhere how you can use external flash drives to store temporary data that would normally be written and read from an internal HDD. Or are the transfer speeds too slow for that to be any use?

I'd love to see a 16GB solid state HDD for $800 (around �600 i beleive) just to run your OS from. Would love to see what difference it made.

[dave @ Jun 29th 2007 7:01PM]

yea, but it'd only use 4 gigs out of all 64... well, i guess it's helpful that you can use the other 60 or so however you want

[Voodoo @ Apr 7th 2006 11:23AM]

How does that transfer speed compare to a regular hd? As mentioned above, the idea of having a a nice 32 or 64 gig solid-state drive in a laptop, using minimal power, and fast transfer speeds seems useful. Will solid-state ever kill the traditional hd?

[DLac @ Apr 7th 2006 11:40AM]

Sweet....forget the amount of storage...You can imagine how long I've been waiting for a flash drive named after German industrial-rock band, KMFDM. :P

[Ron Smith @ Apr 7th 2006 11:41AM]

I found my harddrive for the Nintendo revolution.

['Cisco-- @ Apr 7th 2006 11:50AM]

We awake ourselves to a new era, "Bye bye bye" mechanical moving part HDDs... "I'm Lovin' it!" And another reason to invest in these babies is the low power comsumption, just like the guys above said. Gotta love evolution dude! No doubt 'bout it.

[Cliff @ Apr 7th 2006 12:37PM]

Is there still that issue of finite rewriting of data? That's the thing I always thing about when I hear about flash memory replacing hard disks which allow infinite rewriting of data.

[Santiago @ Apr 7th 2006 12:44PM]

now apple just needs to buy up the chips in massive quantities to drop the price and then we can all get 64 GB iPod nanos. sweet!

[Ken @ Apr 7th 2006 12:45PM]

LOL, at a 5MB/sec write rate, it would take 3.6 hours to fill the drive. 2 hours to read all the info.

[Sean @ Apr 7th 2006 1:01PM]

#11: Some internal hard drive info off the top of my head..

Ultra ATA drives are sort of the legacy standard at this point. They run at a paper speed of 133 MB/s, which is something like 15 times faster.

Serial ATA is the current-gen standard, and they can run up to 2-3 times that number (3.0 Gb/s--gigaBITs, not gigaBYTEs).

#10: In terms of caching, access time is really paramount. RAM, which is normally used for this, has access time measured in single-digit nanoseconds, while even the best internal hard drives are measured in single-digit MILLIseconds. In other words, RAM is approximately 1,000 faster than high-end hard drives in terms of access time. Even if we pretend optimistically that this external drive has the same access time as a good internal drive, you're still nowhere near the performance necessary to really make this work.

To put it another way: You know when you open a bunch of stuff on your computer and the hard drive starts making grinding noises, then everything runs like total crap all of a sudden? That's means that your RAM is overrun and your hard drive's pagefile has taken over. In other words, you're sunk.

So, I agree completely with #1. The interface used here limits this from being any real use for anything serious. Even at 16GB, it would be WAY faster to just buy a fast internal drive and swap it between computers. Or, as #3 said, just buy a laptop. :P

[Jinghao @ Apr 28th 2007 11:41PM]

Gee, last time I checked, nano was a million times smaller than a milli.

[glacia00 @ Apr 7th 2006 1:09PM]

I can't think of many uses for it although 64G of flash deffinately gives you geek bragging rights.

Although this is too pricey, perhaps flash could fill the backup storage hole that currently exists. There really hasn't been a good backup storage medium for years. DVDs are too small and Hard Drives too unreliable. Where do you dump 50+GB of files that you don't want to lose?

12 DVDs then when you want to backup more you have to figure out which of those thousands of files you've already backed up?

Hard Drive and hope it doesn't die?

[Jason @ Apr 7th 2006 1:13PM]

#18: great info. Give that man a star!

by the by, who this would be useful for at least in current gen speeds is photographers. High end 16Meg + Digital cameras are running up to 4 gig flash cards these days... but what do you do when you're on site and that flash card is full? Why swap to your back up 1 gig flash card whilst you start dumping the 4 gig flash card to your 64 Gig flash drive. And a professional photographer could probably justify the price, too.

:j

[dbell @ Apr 7th 2006 3:06PM]

I'm left sitting here, wondering why they didn't just spend the extra $50 per unit to add a headphone jack and a play button. who wouldn't want to have a 60GB mp3 player they could put through the wash?

[Coyote @ Apr 7th 2006 4:36PM]

Dispite what #19 says you can run an OS off this drive or any other flash drive for that. I have a 512mb one useing a 3rd party boot disk (cant say what it is) that runs win98, 2000, me and all variants of older dos windows and even linux (and tons of disk testing and burn-in tools). Granted it is to slow to use as a full OS but as a recovery and test drive its perfect.

And I give it 5 years and this drive (or ones like it) will be at 10% the cost and 10 times faster. Mark my words.

[D911 @ Apr 7th 2006 5:53PM]

"Sweet....forget the amount of storage...You can imagine how long I've been waiting for a flash drive named after German industrial-rock band, KMFDM. :P"

haha, KMFDM is an awesome band!
However, I don't really count them as German really, seeing as only Sascha is the only german guy in it. heh.

[JORDANSATOK.COM PODCAST @ Apr 8th 2006 10:02AM]

I think that they need to add firewire to it.. USB is just to slow..

[matt @ Apr 8th 2006 11:59AM]

You have NO idea how much the KMFDM made my day. Mostly because they are badder than the best, megalomaniacal, and harder than the rest.

[Jill Carrol @ Apr 8th 2006 3:07PM]

I think that they need to add WindowsXP to it.. USB flash drive is only for data...
http://www.apponusb.com

[Andrew @ Apr 10th 2006 7:27PM]

Wow... I can't wait till they price it for people who don't drive Ferraris. In about 5 years we'll be carrying entire HD's worth of data around in our pockets. Although I'd probably surgically attach it to my pinky finger (or replace it, why not?) to make sure I didn't lose it. I've lost 3 flash drives already...

[drew @ Apr 11th 2006 11:06AM]

internal hard drives are nowhere near 133MB/s unless you have a few 10k rpm raptor on a RAID 0 setup... Normal SATA drives are usually around 50-60 MB/s and IDE a tad bit slower for the fast ones. 133 MB/s is just for the PATA bus. SATA bus is either 150 MB/s or 300 MB/s depending on SATA or SATA II.

[zafar @ Jun 28th 2006 2:05PM]

let the price come down to $200 or so and I will buy one! I got 512MB two years ago and so far its more than enough for my needs.

[Nhat @ Jun 14th 2007 3:14AM]

2800 / 64 = $43.75 per GB

Go buy an 80gb external hard drive from ebay for less than $1 per gb

[QQ @ Jun 17th 2007 7:31AM]

9MB/sec read and 5MB/sec write speeds

too slow not even 80x speed

[Pirokasa @ Nov 17th 2008 3:13AM]

I'd rather carry thirty or fourty 4gig flash drives on a keychain than dish out that much cash for something my cat will probably eat when I go to sleep.

[Mark D @ Dec 3rd 2008 8:55AM]

Look at that price of when this thing came out. You can get a 32gb right now for 60 bucks! I really hope no one bought that 64gb at that price. Give it another year and 64 gb will be as low priced as the 32gb.