Yes, 1 TB as in 1024 GB! Kingston had announced they had made the first 1TB USB stick during this weeks Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Tom’s Hardware was able to get their hands on one, well a prototype (as seen below) at least at CES. Given the Kingston 512 GB model has a price tag of a little under $1800, they are not going to have a working version of the 1 TB just out in the open. The 1 TB model will support USB 3.0 with read/write speeds upto (provided your system has USB 3.0 ports) 240MB/s and 160MB/s. If you don’t have USB 3.0 (computers prior to 2009) it still backwards compatible with USB 2.0 standard.
The release date is ‘First Quarter 2013’ and the price…well that hasn’t been announced yet. One could guess it is going to be around $3000-$3500 based on the pricing of the 512 GB model. $3500 is what a decent computer use to cost you back in the 90’s. Even now, you could get the priciest Mac Book Pro out there (which has a 750 GB HD) for around $2200.
About three months ago I purchase a 32 GB USB stick through Amazon for $20 and a 64 GB over the summer for around $32. If you are looking for additional storage or backup space and don’t need the portability you can get a Western Digital ‘My Passport’ External 1 TB drive for around $100 or an internal for $75. I have an older 500 GB Western Digital ‘My Book’ external drive that I bought several years ago at that time for backup purposes for around the same price (may be more) as their 1 TB model now. I still use it for backups, but since the Linksys/Cisco E3200 router I bought this past spring has a USB port I am able to use this a network drive on my home network.
Like everything else technology related, it will get cheaper in time. I would suspect to see a drastic price cut on the 512 GB model once this one is released. I just don’t see myself needing that much space. My hard drive is 512 GB as is my ‘network’ drive and I am using a little over 120 GB of space on my main drive. I do have lots of music and images (only a small percentage of which are high-res). I suppose if I were to use my digital camera at the full 10 MP setting I could fill up some that space. Of course full HD (1080p) Video is suppose to takes up a lot of space as well, but I just don’t want to watch feature length HD Videos on my computer.
