Article 9 - Large Capacity Devices - the dangers of these

Last month Kingston Technology introduced a Data Traveler with a massive 256GB storage capacity - dwarfing the 64GB and 128GB devices that have previously been on the market. The Data Traveler® 310 (pictured) will enable the user to store images, movies and pretty much anything on their new device.

Whilst it may seem very attractive to have such a  large storage potential on a flash device, particularly one you can carry i there are dangers associated with storing so much data on a USB memory Stick.

Firstly, recovering such a device will prove complex. Current NAND reading technology is always having to keep pace with increasing storage capacities. A few months ago recovering devices of 8GB and 16GB proved extremely challenging to our technicians. Now - recovering 32GB and 64GB devices can prove extremely difficult, so one can imagine the issues associated with a device of 256GB! This is also going to impact the recovery costs.

Realistically recovering a small capacity device isn't likely to take too long, we allow a standard 5-7 days for our service but we often are able to recover them in a far shorter time period. We can't however give any such indication of how long it might take to recover a 256GB device. For a start the device is likely to have 16 16GB Flash NAND chips in the internal PCB. Reading the RAW data will take many hours - even days - and this is before we have begun to decode the complex algorithms!

Anyone who offers a flash device recovery, particularly one who offers a recovery from 30 or 40 quid will have no chance at recovering one of these. We know how long and how much effort it will take to recover this type of device and a fee of several hundred pounds will be in order.

Our advice would therefore be that, for now, steer clear of these as should you use one and it fails a recovery fee of several hundred, possibly even thousand pounds will be in order. USB Data Recovery Services always try to offer cost effective recovery from portable flash storage media but in this case the fees are more than likely going to price the recovery beyond the reach of pretty much everyone. Mind you the fact the current retail price of this device in the US is $1077 we wonder how many people will be buying them when you can by a magnetic storage Hard Disk for as little as fifty pounds.

posted 10/07/10