Hasta La Gadget!

SanDisk has announced a new USB flash drive this morning. This one is called the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive and offers up to 64GB of storage along with a … Continue reading

Earlier this year we learned about Gigs 2 Go, a concept for a credit card-sized pack of flash drives that you can “tear and share.” Inventors Kurt Rampton and BOLTgroup seem to have figured out how to mass produce the drives and are now raising funds on Kickstarter.

The final product is almost exactly the same as the concept. The drives come in packs of four. The pack and the drive cases are made of recycled paper, and perforations make it easy to tear a drive off the pack. The only difference is that the concept called for a plastic-free product, but Kurt and his partners eventually decided to add a plastic carrier to Gigs 2 Go. That’s because the drive they’re using is so thin that it won’t fit snugly into a USB port on its own. At least the carrier is made of recycled plastic.

Pledge at least $30 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a pack of 2GB Gigs 2 Go drives as a reward. You can also get 4GB and 8GB packs with larger pledges.

Everyone loves statistics, especially the superlatives, and hence it is no wonder that each year’s edition of the Guinness Book of World Records have done exceptionally well for itself. After all, we as humans seem somehow obsessed about stuff like the largest and the fastest, and new records which are set are always celebrated as another notch in the realm of human achievement. It is no different then, for Mushkin, an industry-leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance and mission-critical computer products, have just announced yet another feather in their cap – the official availability of the fastest USB flash drive in the world, which happens to be known as the Ventura Ultra.

Originally shown off at CES 2013 earlier this year, the Ventura Ultra happens to be a USB 3.0 flash drive that carries a whopping 240GB of storage space, making it the fastest in the world of its kind. This particular flash drive would obviously boast of extremely fast data transfer rates of up to 380 MB/s read and 325 MB/s write (theoretically speaking, considering these are well within the limits of the USB 3.0 standard, but in real life one might experience something different). Not only that, it comes with a rugged aluminum casing to deliver additional durability and resistance. Just a reminder for the masses, the USB 3.0 standard is up to 10 times faster compared to USB 2.0, and best of all is, it happens to be backwards compatible with legacy USB ports and devices.

Best of all is, the Mushkin Ventura Ultra is a dying breed, being one of the few USB flash drives in the world that does offer USB Attached SCSI Protocol support, so that it paves the way for command queuing so that it can maximize the transfer rate potential. Each purchase will arrive with a 2-year warranty when it becomes available worldwide this coming October 7th.

Product Page
[ Mushkin at the forefront with Ventura Ultra USB, the world’s fastest flash drive copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

It’s been a while since I featured a product from Brando, and I have to say I’m slightly disappointed with what they recently showed to us. It’s a USB drive shaped like a king chess piece. I know right? A perfectly reasonable, gift ready gadget that doesn’t make you want to bash your head against the wall in confusion? What’s going on at Brando?

The only weird thing about it it’s that Brando calls it a Chess Flash Drive. And it’s not even that weird! They just accidentally a word.

If you’re looking for a gift for a chess fan, get this from Brando. It sells for $16 to $38 (USD) depending on the capacity you want. Meanwhile I’ll be here mourning the end of an era.

Buffalo has revealed its latest external drive, the DriveStation DDR HD-GDU3, slotting more RAM into the USB 3.0-connected enclosure so as to rival SSD speeds, allegedly, with HDD pricing. The new drive, available in 2TB and 3TB capacities, uses traditional spinning-platter disks to keep prices down, but Buffalo claims that thanks to a combination of caching and other tweaking it’ll reach write speeds of up to 400 MB/s.

That’s a pretty impressive number for an HDD-based external drive, if Buffalo can sustain it, while the quoted read rate of 330 MB/s is also ample. In fact, Buffalo claims, it’ll take around 3.5s to shuttle 800MB of photos from a PC to the DriveStation DDR.

So far, high-speed has generally been synonymous with SSD, with solid-state drives cropping up in models like LaCie’s Little Big Disk. That uses not only solid-state storage for performance, but hooks up via Thunderbolt.

Buffalo has stuck with USB 3.0, which is theoretically a “narrower pipe” than Thunderbolt, but arguably makes up for it by being more commonly available (plus backward-compatible with USB 2.0, albeit with a speed hit). It’ll work with both PCs and Macs.

The DDR’s trick is more cache than you’d usually find in an external drive: in this case, 1GB of DDR3 memory. Buffalo is being coy with the details, but says that by buffering files during larger jobs, it can bypass the bandwidth limits of traditional HDDs and push content through the USB 3.0 connection more readily.

We’ll have to wait until we can test the DriveStation DDR out ourselves before we know how accurate that all is – in our experience with drives that use caching systems, we’ve generally found that the performance isn’t necessarily consistent across all content stored. The drive is shipping now, priced at $159.99/£129 for the 2TB model and $209.99/£169 for the 3TB model.

Buffalo DriveStation DDR claims SSD speeds with HDD hardware is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.