Competition in tech (or anywhere really) brings about some really cool innovations. Though sometimes we just have to agree that some of these inventions or innovations aren’t really half as useful to us as we’d like them to be.
Still wondering whether to say the same about massive storage flash drives or not, considering how we are moving towards cloud storage. Of course there’s need for back up (which you can still do online by the way) but how safe do you think your files are in a plastic flash drive?
At CES, SanDisk availed their 1 Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes = 1 000 000 Megabytes) flash drive prototype. Not that it’s the first flash to have such an enormous storage capacity since Kingstone already released it’s own 2TB DataTraveler Ultimate GT sometime last year, but it’s definitely the first that has USB-C.
Apart from the USB-C advantage, the SanDisk 1TB flash is quite slimmer than the Kingstone DataTraveler Ultimate GT. Again, unlike the Kingstone DataTraveler Ultimate GT which is quoted with zinc-alloy, the SanDisk 1TB flash drive is made of mostly plastic. It’s this slim and less-chunky design that most would view as SanDisk’s competitive advantage but honestly that’s exactly what worries me.
As I mentioned earlier on, I wouldn’t be too comfortable keeping such amounts of data in a slim plastic flash, whether because of paranoia or otherwise, when it comes to such massive storage, I’m all for the external hard drive. Of course neither the ext. hard drive nor the flash are invincible, but I think the probability of physically damaging or losing a plastic flash is higher than that of damaging or losing an ext. hard drive, or zinc-alloy chunky flash at least.
Also to think that these flash drives don’t come cheap, the 1TB Kingstone DataTraveler Ultimate GT costs over $700 (US prices) while the SanDisk 1TB flash drive is estimated to cost about $350 (also US price, before factoring in the Zim premium which can either be for the flash itself or for the USD used to buy online) is a deterrence for me. I mean consider the fact that you can get an ext. hardrive with an equivalent storage capacity for less than $180 locally.
Added to that, instead of storing videos or movies in your laptop/ipad/phone or wherever, you can just stream them while you store your important pictures and documents on free cloud storage services such as Google drive and Drop box or even on social media (I know it’s not the best especially if you’re too fussy about picture quality but oh well…). But then again, the option of storing online depends on the individual’s access to the internet.
Regardless, I personally don’t see any other reason of channeling resources towards making these high storage flash drives since we’re already moving away from physical storage anyway; if not for status and ego.
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