Western Digital reveals world&#39;s smallest 1TB USB-C flash drive at CES

The appealing thing about the 1TB model is that some people (hobbyists probably) could carry around the entire photo library with them. Pros, maybe not so much as I'm sure they have more than 1TB of photos, but for your hobbyist shooter, you could carry everything you need in your pocket. Yes, the 128GB or 256GB is also appealing as a backup drive that's portable while traveling, versus carrying around an external hard rive. If they do end up being able to write at a reasonable speed, I might consider one (when available) to replace or supplement my current External SSD drive for my photos. The only problem is that not all computers have USB-C ports, but that will change over the next few years.

Jan 12, 2018permalink

Jeff Peterman

The 256 GB one is more appealing - small enough to be left in all the time, so a great way to add extra storage space to a compact laptop with a 128 GB SSD.

Jan 10, 2018permalink

S Yu

A drive of that form factor is probably really slow to write though, I'm guessing about 20MB/s.

Jan 23, 2018permalink

SushiCub

"The world smallest" is kind of misleading? ;P I just searched but some Chinese companies make them and it looks smaller, haha. Small is good but for this department, too small isn't the best?

Jan 10, 2018*permalink

S Yu

Those are probably fake with 8-32GB usable space, and also sold at less than 200RMB(another hint of those being fake). The only other company I know of that makes 1TB flash drives is Kingston, whose prices have remained fairly stable for years for lack of competition.

Jan 23, 2018permalink

CaPi

Another dongle I can now maybe do without. Oh wait.. now the other guy will need one..

Jan 10, 2018permalink

adengappasami

Porn lovers dream tool

Jan 10, 2018permalink

Chances are the write speed is abysmal.

Companies think their customers are so stupid, and I called out WD at the last photo expo for selling 5200 speed HD's in their full size desktop chassis which most would expect to be a standard modern 7200 rpm drive. Thats one red flag.

The booth guys rationale was that it was the SAME drives being sold through all thier lines, including G Drive, with different firmware, and it was fine. Thats two red flags.

Now they have this brand new flash drives, with a read spead of up to 130mbs, and the write spead is....um...where?

While the wireless HD drive is useful no matter what speed the disc drive is, WD has fallen into the same customer-ripoff actions that happens whenever the market consolidates.

Jan 10, 2018permalink

5400 rpm drives have their place in 'modern' desktops. Quieter, less heat, less power. The SSD is used for speed. Any platters are used for bulk storage. Though in truth, my last 3 desktop builds have been SSD only, with bulk storage moved to a NAS.

Jan 10, 2018permalink

Ran Plett

Mb/s is different than MB/s. 130 Mb/s would be really slow.

Also, you could get a Samsung 1-2 TB mSATA SSD and an enclosure and it will be tiny, not much bigger than the one above, and it will have read / write speeds of about 540 / 420 MB/s respectively. Or, if you're feeling lazy get a Samsung T5

Jan 11, 2018permalink

Unless the enclosure has air vent holes, I would not recommend an mSATA in an external enclosure. I had a Samsung mSATA 1TB drive die because the enclosure it was in got too hot and caused the drive to overheat (no longer works now)--it lasted for about 2 years in that enclosure, but I still lost a $300 SSD drive because of heat issues with some of the older mSATAs. the new m.2 SATA drives I think handle heat better. But anyway, after the one drive died, I used a regular SSD in my next DIY USB SSD drive, and put it into an enclosure with air vent holes. A consumer drive, such as the WD SSD drives or Samsung external SSDs are a different story as they are designed and tested in the enclosures they come in, but a I would exercise caution doing a DIY mSATA external drive... just make sure the drive (any drive really: SSD or HDD), has air flow to it or at least some air vents in the casing. All drives fail, but keeping them cool can ensure a longer life than one that runs hot.

Jan 12, 2018*permalink

Regardless if 5400 rpm drives are good (they are, totally fine for portables with usb3), hiding the drive speed is sneaky in any case. For those of us that buy a lot for external gear, ALL the details matter. Remember drive speed used to actually be a selling point. and now, especially for sd cards, companies go out of their way to hide the write speed info. NOT GOOD.

Jan 12, 2018permalink

I'm going to guess the write speeds, at least on the smaller drive, are some where in the 40-50MB/s write speeds, maybe less, since the read speed caps out at 130MB/s according to the article. And in my experience, write speeds can be expectedt to be around 1/2 or 1/3 of the read speeds, although there is no magic formula. My SanDisk Extreme / Pro cards seem to only be able to write around 50-60MB/s in my D750 (some of it is that the D750 was not officially certified to utilize full UHS-II or UHS-III cards) but I think that's probably a fair number, as I've also seen in some tests. So yes, I think the write speeds on both drives above will be just average and probably nothing super exciting. But only some benchmarks will tell us for sure.

Jan 12, 2018permalink

It's still not that difficult to figure out which WD colors translate to 5400 or 7200 or 10k, even as their marketers shifted to "inteiiipower." It's certainly not a valid reason to trust or distrust this new product. One has nothing to do with the other.

Jan 12, 2018permalink

Usually there is a trade-off in terms of the WD Blue drives or Green drives if that's what people are arguing about. They used to have 7200 RPM drives (and still do) but the newer ones have more onboard cache to temporarily store data as its being read off the drive, which this onboard memory on the drive controller is faster than the drive itself, so the small speed decrease (from 7200 RPM to 5400 RPM is far less noticeable with newer drives than it was with older drives that had the same cache memory). I can tell you between some of my WD Blue 7200 RPM drives with, say maybe 32MB cache, versus my 5400RPM 3TB Green drives with 64MB cache, I can't really tell the difference in speed between the two, also partially because they are storage drives, and not boot devices. For serving up media files, 5400 RPM with a larger cache should be plenty (64MB or more). part of the speed decrease has to do with power consumption and heat.

Jan 12, 2018permalink

The few instacnes where drive speed might significantly impact performance (or where it might be seen the most) is servers that are serving up lots of data and constantly read/writing to the drive all the time... then you have the high-performance 15k RPM drives for those. You might see a 1 second lag between a 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drive that's not a system/boot drive, but rather serves up files. For the average user, the difference is not as big of a deal anymore, as newer drive technology helps improve the efficiency in the drives (both in power consumption, heat, and storage/retrieval performance).

Jan 12, 2018*permalink

"It's still not that difficult to figure out which WD colors translate to 5400 or 7200 or 10k, even as their marketers shifted to "inteiiipower." It's certainly not a valid reason to trust or distrust this new product. One has nothing to do with the other."

This is...um... I don't understand why consumers don't demand straight info from the company/products they invest thier hard earned money in, ignorance is a right in this aspect. Vaya con dios.

Some features affect performance more than others, however write speed is one of the top performance metrics of PC's- period! (ie, Sean Spicy). Marketers know that the biggest numbers are the most attractive.

Also, why should YOU have to figure out what the simple metric of write speed is? Yes there's testing, however that SIMPLE piece of info can just be supplied in the product details.

Otherwise, ask for nothing, get nothing.

Jan 14, 2018permalink

Reading through this thread again, the commenters sounds like the PERFECT group of consumers to sell product to...especially for rip-everyone-off American brands. Talk about lowered expectations...SAD! (but great for thier bottom line)

Jan 14, 2018permalink

Are you being obtuse to make the argument, or are you really this pedantic? How could you buy anything from any storage device maker - they all have been lying for decades when they defined a megabyte as a million bytes rather than 1,048,576 bytes to boost their numbers. Under your petty logic, that should be a disqualifier.

https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-storage/wd-red.html
"RPM Class
5400"

End of nonsense.

Jan 15, 2018permalink

In regards to the 1MB being stated as 1,000,000 bytes vs. the actual 1,048/576 (which is what it mathematically is if you use the true definition of a byte and what makes up a megabyte, etc). This brings back to memory, the time when Seagate got sued (at least, I think it was a lawsuit) regarding advertised space vs. actual space. One factor that people do forget (non-computer people at least) is that your formatted space is less than the actual stated drive space (I believe now, then do specify this on the box, and even so, that varies with the file system used). But, formatted space doesn't actually affect performance in terms of speed of the drive, so I guess this is more of a side note. But yes they have been lying and Seagate got called out (despite almost every HDD mfr doing it).

Jan 15, 2018permalink

@kelpdiver

It seems like you have a hard time disseminating information - an anecdote about a product and another example of not providing consumers with the full information.... and since you disagree, it's nonsense? How sad for you.

It's a simple thing to add the write speed, as you can see they had no such issue with the read speed. for example...

I recently bought a very highly rated thumbdrive that was supposed to be measured at a certain write speed, which was critical to how it would be used. Lo and behold, after purchasing, it was wayyyyy under. I mean barely hitting usb2.0 speed. Now i cannot use it for what i bought it for...and that's NOT good.

I guess that's a nonsense example also. Sheesh louise. :/

Jan 15, 2018permalink