Wednesday 2 May 2012

Verbatim offers a retractable USB 3.0 flash drive for $20


 With Intel finally adding support for USB 3.0 as part of Ivy Bridge, there’s really no excuse now for storage manufacturers to embrace the faster standard across their entire portable storage ranges.

Verbatim is one such vendor responding to that call with news of a new flash stick carrying the Store ‘n’ Go name. The Store ‘n’ Go V3 offers up a typical USB stick form factor, but with a USB 3.0 interface and therefore significantly faster transfer speeds than its USB 2.0 predecessors.

Whether you like the V3 depends on your preference for caps or not. Verbatim has decided to replace the cap with a retractable design instead. So while the USB connector is hidden from view, it isn’t completely protected. However, on the plus side there’s no cap to lose and those connectors are pretty tough to damage.
 
 

 Prices for the Store ‘n’ Go V3 start at a pretty reasonable $19.99 for the 8GB version, and there’s a range of 7 colors to choose from. Storage options go up to 64GB, but I’m hoping 128GB and even 256GB start becoming more common soon. Both sizes are already possible in a stick form as Kingston demonstrated as far back as 2009. Only now, they should be a lot cheaper.

At $20 for 8GB of storage, the V3 looks to be on par with what’s already available. But with more cloud storage services such as Google Drive coming online and offering free storage, flash drives need to start offering more to convince consumers to spend money. More storage for less moneyre the two real areas where they can out perform the cloud, and for an offline backup solution a flash drive offers a relatively cheap, resilient solution.


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