Are you a videographer shooting hours and hours of raw 4K video? A photographer with a couple hundred thousand 18-megapixel photos to handle? Or maybe a hardcore PC gamer who needs to have dozens of your favorite titles with you at all times? If you said yes to any of those, it’s likely that you understand the headache that comes with huge amounts of data management, keeping track of hard drives and cloud accounts and cables. Good news! Even if you’re all of those things and more, your memory woes can be solved with one single USB flash drive. At CES 2017, portable storage mavens Kingston Digital debuted their DataTraveler Ultimate GT drive in a whopping 2 terabytes. The Fountain Valley, California-based company is doubling-down, proving that their 1TB drive from a few years back wasn’t the limit of their potential. If you’ve ever dreamed of holding absolutely ridiculous amounts of storage in your palm, either as a “daily driver” or just as a backup stick, here’s your chance.
2TB is enough for 70 hours of 4K footage at 30fps, more than 250,000 24-megapixel photos, 166 full-length HD films, or 50 copies of huge AAA-title The Witcher 3. While external hard drives in that capacity have been available for some time now (and are rather affordable) this is the first stick-style USB drive to hit that mark. A durable zinc-alloy metal casing gives the Ultimate GT a professional, industrial look, but the device’s size isn’t anything that could fit on your keyring. The choice of USB-A means that you might quickly need to purchase a dongle adapter for USB-C devices…but, given the size and shape of the Ultimate GT, you’ll need one anyway for use with most laptops, unless you want to leave the USB-side of your MacBook hanging over the edge of the table. The price hasn’t been released yet, but sources are speculating the 2TB model to be in the $800-$900 range.
At iFixYouri we find it odd that Kingston (and other USB drive manufacturers, soon) went straight from 1TB to 2TB; no 1.5TB flash drive in the interim. Seems that USB drives follow Moore’s Law and only double in capacity, so be on the lookout for a 4TB drive in the future.