Wow - The Arrival of the 1TB (One Terabyte) USB Drive

OK it’s unlikely to be used as a promotional giveaway any time soon but if you really do need a small, portable USB backup device then they don’t come much bigger (in terms of memory size) or faster in terms of read/write speeds than this new beast which was launched by Samsung at the CES 2015 show in Las Vegas.

Named the T1 it really does take portable storage to another level and demonstrates that there is still plenty of life in the portable storage market. Yes, the “cloud” is having an impact but it’s have little impact at the promotional end of the market and recent “hacking issues” have raised genuine concerns about the security of any data stored in the cloud.

The Samsung T1 is smaller than a credit card (72mm x 52mm), it looks amazing (hats off to Samsung on the design) and they have addressed users concerns over security by including password protected access and AES 256-bit encryption of the data.

Sammsung T1 Drive - Image courtesy of ZDNet

Of course the big news (no pun intended) is the memory capacity of the T1. One Terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of data. That is huge for a product this small. Bear in mind that only a couple of years ago your average USB memory stick held a seemingly insignificant 1GB of data! To give you a more meaningful idea of what you could do with 1TB of storage it will hold 17,000 hours of music or 320,000 high resolution photos or around 250 DVD films! That’s an awful lot of data in something the size of a credit card!

To make sure you don’t have to sit around for hours waiting to transfer your files to and from the T1 Samsung have worked really hard to improve the read/write speeds and claim “unparalleled” speeds of 450MB per second! (Your average USB 2.0 memory sticks have read/write speeds of around 4-8MB per second).

In summary it’s a beast albeit a small, perfectly formed beast.

The T1 will be available in a couple of weeks’ time but we’re still waiting on prices. Expect them to be north of £300-£400. (The smaller 250GB version is priced at £154.79).

To be clear the T1 is built around Solid State Drive Technology and not Flash Memory but it does connect via a USB cable and to all intents and purposes it works just like a USB flash drive (just a tad quicker). No, we’re not offering these as a promotional USB drive option (yet).