Electro-ramblings

So the USB drive costs roughly as much as a laptop? I'll just assume that this is more of a technology demonstrator than something they expect to see a lot of.

I've got a 8GB flash drive that I do love. It's a great way to carry around the latest pictures and audio files. If I need to carry more, I'll stick with the 250GB USB hard drive that cost about $100. I'll just have to remember to not drop it. ;-)

cheers,
Steve Kurt

At that speed it will take roughly 3.6 hours to copy 256gb of data onto it and I doubt it can maintain that speed throughout the file writing process.

I know that my 1tb drive took about a day to format when I bought it and only had a usb caddy(thankfully I now use the eSata connector).

I think I'll keep to my 16 gb stick until someone makes one to use on a faster interface standard.

LJ.

Good call on the HDD, I think, Steve!

LJ - that brings to mind a particular bugbear of mine - see RAM, USB 2.0 and acronym misuse.

Speaking of which, a case of mis-labelling that comes to my mind involves USB - specifically, the USB 2.0 specification. The promise of higher data transfer speeds held by the '2.0' creditation seemed groundless when it was revealed USB 2.0 was nothing but a superset... Unless a device declared itself "Hi-Speed", USB 2.0 as a nomenclature was meaningless. Everything conforming to USB 1.1 was already part of USB 2.0.

Officially the USB 2.0 Specification encompassed a range of USB data transfer speeds, including 'low' (1.5Mbit/sec), 'full' (12Mbit/sec) and 'high' (480Mbit/sec) implementations. The organisation supervising USB - the USB-IF (Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum) - said it was important that vendors clearly indicate the exact type of product on the packaging and in marketing materials. But of course, it is not always in the vendor's interest to clarify.

Judging by past performance: In 18 months it will be 20 quid (or less!)