Trends in USB Flash Keys

NPD In-Stat (see today’s news) sees a boom of USB 3.0 from 70 million devices with this interface in 2011 to one billion in 2014. They include not only USB keys but PCs, peripherals, networking, CE devices, etc.

The big news here is that Intel recently achieved SuperSpeed USB certification, guaranteeing increased SuperSpeed penetration of the PC market.

What are the current prices of USB?
Not like HDD, the price per gigabyte of USB key doesn’t decrease drastically according to the capacity of the key because the amount of storage depends directly on the number of the flash chips, the most expansive components into USB sticks. Here is an example using the MSRP prices of SanDisk:

(Source: SanDisk)

But you can buy these keys at much lower prices, roughly at one dollar per gigabytre. On nextag.com you can find 4GB and 8GB units as low as $7, 16GB at $19, 32GB at $25, 64GB at $64 and 128GB at $139. 256GB devices are much more expansive, at least $401.

       
Lowest Prices

(Source: nextag.com)

Here are the technical trends of these flash keys as observed these last months.

Units at less than 1GB are disappearing, and this year will be the big one for 64GB, a capacity already reached by most of the manufacturers.

We don’t see today the limit in capacity. Current record is 1TB into a Swiss army knife by Victorinox Swiss Army. It represents the maximum capacity of today’s 2.5-inch HDDs. You cannot put more data currently on a 3.5-inch magnetic disk platter with the best areal density.

At Display Taiwan last August, Taiwan’s Transcend Information and Industrial Technology Research Institute showed off an USB 3.0 flash drive, dubbed Thin Card, slightly thicker than a penny, with 2TB of storage space. Since then, there was no confirmation that this product will appear.

With the help of more and more smaller chips (19nm process arriving), the size of the keys are diminishing. Dimensions are 31.5×14.8×7.3mm for the PQI USB 3.0 device, 25.6×16.7×8.4mm for the Kingston DataTraveler Micro, and the world record seems to be owned by Dutch Deonet with 19,5×14,5×2,9 mm.

Several vendors have added hardware or software encryption (128-bit and even 256-bis AES encryption), sometimes with a small keyboard on the key to enter your password.

Some of them are designed to be shock-resistant and waterproof.

Now you can boot your computer from an USB key or use it as Windows ReadyBoost allowing to use the external memory device as a cache for HDD or a PC.

You can also get an adapted backup software to store on the small device the data of your PC. Some of them are also offered with an online storage service.

The vendors have infinite imagination for their design: paper-clip, key integrated in eyeglasses, etc.

Another way to convince the buyers is to sell the key pre-loaded with music or movies.

USB keys, external HDDs and online backup have definitively killed floppies, writable optical discs and tapes -except for very high capacities – for external storing, backuping and exchanging data.

Recently appeared new interesting flash modules. They are not like keys but small boxes with flash memories to expand wirelessly the storage of smart phones or tablets or to transfer data to the box and to any wireless computer. It can be compared with some current WiFi HDDs but with flash memories