Buffalo have unleashed a brand new addtion to their TurboUSB range, a 32 GB model, the SHD-U32GS. The 32 GB version is the same physical size as the 16 GB model and according to Buffalo is 16% faster than non TurboUSB models.

It weighs in at a mere 20g, measures a snug 19 x 14 x 91 mm and has a handy switch to prevent accidental removal of your zeroes and ones.

This little sucker is currently only available in Japan for around the US$300 mark, but it should be spreading it wings and appearing in shops overseas soon.

Featured Tags buffalo, flash-drive


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Over at tgdaily they’ve posted about an interview with the CTO, David Flynn, of Fusion io talking about their new ioDrive. The ioDrive is a PCI Express card with 640 GB of flash memory that you can slip onto your motherboard to provide extra networked storage. The unit does indeed boast some impressive figures with a read rate of 800 MBps and 600 MBps for writing. Probably the single most impressive figure is the 100,000 operations per second which far out strips any standard HDD.

What confused me was that the claim by Fusion io that the tiny card could replace banks of hard drives. Err, I think not, with a 640 GB unit planned for early next year it’s certainly an alternative to standard HDDs but the implication is that it will save computing space. Whilst the max capacity is only 640 GB, I don’t think it will do that at all. Whilst I’m not going to calcuate the volume of a PCI express card compared to a HDD unit I think anyone can easily see that it’s going to be pretty close to 1:1 ratio on space used when comparing a 640 GB PCI express drive to one of the 1 TB HDDs out there at the moment. I agree that the io Drive will be able to serve files much more efficiently over a network but as usual a company has spouted off some marketing rubbish whilst ignoring the actual benefits of their product.

Another thing that annoyed me was the implication that their estimated cost at US$30 per GB would interest a lot of large organisations. May be it would but when current storage costs are around US$0.30 per GB any organisation investing in this storage technology would have to have some pretty serious file serving issues. So for the other 99.99% of the world (that’ll be you and me) we’ll be ‘shackled’ with our oh so slow HDDs for a while yet!

Featured Tags flash-drive, Fusion-io, hdd, ioDrive, pci-express


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Flash drive capacity seems to increase on daily basis … and today is no different. SanDisk, the storage gurus, have squeezed in a massive 8 GB of flash memory into their little Cruzer USB drive. The drive also boasts a retractable connector - better than a cover which you’d only lose after five minutes - and also gives Vista a ReadyBoost.

This little sucker comes with the following onboard software

* CruzerSync synchronization software
* SignupShield password manager
* SKYPE “Make video calls from PC to PC”
* AVAST antivirus software

And it does come with a largish price tag of US$130 but hey it’s 8 GB of extremely light weight storage. What you complaining about?

Source: Business Wire

Featured Tags cruzer, flash-drive, sandisk, usb-drive


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