CES 2013: Kingston Lets You Buy Big Expensive USB Drives

Subject: General Tech, Storage, Shows and Expos | January 7, 2013 - 06:26 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: CES, ces 2013, kingston, thumb drive

Typical USB and SD-style memory card storage scale pretty effectively to the $1 per GB except for the really small drives which cost proportionally more due to non-negligible packaging and distribution costs. This ratio puts 16 and 32GB removable memory in the hands of just about anyone who even remotely desires it. However, for your really large storage needs, a removal hard drive is pretty much your only choice.

If you were to extend the $1/GB ratio up to drive sizes of 512GB or a terabyte then you are looking at $500-1000 worth of silicon in your pocket. Still, Kingston believes that if you desire a full terabyte of storage that you should be able to give them money to provide it to you.

Unfortunately it does not quite scale at the $1/GB ratio.

The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 has four unique names and about a four-fold increase in price-per-Gigabyte compared to standard USB flash memory. The 512GB version is set to retail for $1750 per stick. For some reason Kingston would not comment on the expected retail price of the 1TB version? I guess it is a case of if you need to ask…

If you are still interested in purchasing this thumb-drive -- then for one it must mean something to you -- but it does have 240MB/s read speeds and 160MB/s write speeds over USB3.0. If you are looking to actually use your 512GB drive then you would be able to fill it up in about an hour. Then again, if it does mean that much to you, Kingston apparently is happy to provide.

PC Perspective's CES 2013 coverage is sponsored by AMD.

Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!