The friendly folks over at Kanguru Solutions have announced a $2800 64GB USB flash drive – only $44/GB. Shipments are supposed to begin later this month.
They also offer 16 and 32 GB versions for, respectively, $800 or $50/GB, and $1500 or $47/GB. The 16GB capacity is shipping today.
The 64GB monster would take almost two hours to fully load at a generous write speed of 10MB/sec. But that is beside the point. It’s just having the biggest freaking flash drive. w00t!
Boot Hill
You can configure flash drives to boot Windows XP. Yet since it is most reliable with FAT16, 2GB is the most you can use. Maybe Vista will change that.
Linux users can also boot from USB. 64GB might be overkill, since bootable Linux fits comfortably on 256MB drives, but so what?
Mac users are SOL: OS X only boots from firewire. Kanguru has those too.
Update: Chris points out that the Intel Macs DO boot from USB flash drives. See his comment for the details. Cool!
“Mac users are SOL: OS X only boots from firewire.” – Not true. The current Intel Mac systems can boot off of USB no problem. I have a Mac mini (Core Duo) that I’m personally booting off of a 4GB USB Flash Drive. It’s not fast…but it works. The flash drive will need to be formatted on an Intel machine to assure it has the GPT (GUID Partition Table). I installed and slimmed down a stock load of OS X 10.4.7 on an external Firewire drive, then used SuperDuper to do a logical copy to the USB Flash drive.
Chris, thanks for the update! Yet another reason to buy a Mac Book, though I’m waiting for the first rev, which I am guessing will be before the end of the year.
And I suppose you could boot off one of those relatively inexpensive USB 2.0 hard drives as well. Gotta love it.
I don’t suppose you can boot a non-Mac into OS X with it, can you?
Yes…external USB HDDs work just fine too. Haven’t really dabled in booting non-Mac hardware, but there are plenty of folks that are. I believe some recent changes in OS X have made this more difficult, but I don’t have any first hand experience on this. Also, it appears Apple is already shipping Mac Book Pros with rev’d logic boards…I imagine the Mac Books will be rev’d sometime soon too.
I regularly boot off my Firewire drive for drive maintenance (Disk Warrior) on my PB. USB enclosure prices are so low that they are very attractive.
I’d heard that they’ve rev’d the motherboard on Mac Book Pros, and that is good. Normally they rev with a processor boost after about six months as well as putting in the stuff they wanted in the first rev but ran out of time for. I’ve been pretty happy with my rev 0 12″PB, and I’m betting they’ll come out with a long battery life 3 lb Mac Book Pro. Although I really like the easy HDD replacement on the Mac Books – a great way to extend a machines life.