Kanguru's 64GB Flash Drive Max, only $2,800
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Apr 7th 2006 8:00AM
posted Apr 7th 2006 8:00AM
If that $5,000 BUSlink 64GB flash drive
was too rich for ya, then check out the firesale prices over at Kanguru. Their 64GB K[Thanks, Darnell]
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.
Right #1. They have to make the thing fast. But, a 64 GB thumb drive!! Amazing!!! Get me three of 'em!
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.
For that price you can buy a fully fledged laptop, with a bigger HDD!
I need a KMFDM Drive it is "better than the best, megalomaniacal and harder than the rest."
"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...
I'm amazed at how small it is, but like #1 said, it's just too slow.
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.
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.
I have five of these for all my videos.
Seriously though, who would use this? What motivation for laying out $1500 on a flash drive could anyone have?
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.
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.
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
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?
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
I found my harddrive for the Nintendo revolution.
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.
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.
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!
LOL, at a 5MB/sec write rate, it would take 3.6 hours to fill the drive. 2 hours to read all the info.
#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
Gee, last time I checked, nano was a million times smaller than a milli.
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?
#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
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?
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.
"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.
I think that they need to add firewire to it.. USB is just to slow..
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.
I think that they need to add WindowsXP to it.. USB flash drive is only for data...
http://www.apponusb.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
2800 / 64 = $43.75 per GB
Go buy an 80gb external hard drive from ebay for less than $1 per gb
9MB/sec read and 5MB/sec write speeds
too slow not even 80x speed