Taiwan's PQI Group announced the smallest USB 3.0 flash drive in the industry this week with the Intelligent Drive U819V. The metal storage about an inch long, half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch thick. It will soon be available in brushed aluminum, glossy white, or black.
PQI chose to be one of the pioneers of USB 3.0 on Tuesday and added a new entry to its Cool Drive thumb drives. The U366 takes advantage of the 3.0 spec's 5Gbps peak bandwidth to perform at speeds well above those possible with USB 2.0. With peak read speeds of 97MB per second, the storage stick has performance closer to desktop hard drives while consuming the same space as a regular removable USB drive.
PQI has recently released the Cool Drive U360, which connects two computers via their USB ports and allows high-speed (claimed to be 17MBps) file transfers between them. A flash drive in capacities ranging between 4GB and 16GB holds software that syncs folders in the two computers as well as Outlook data when using a Windows PC. Shared folders can also be browsed on either end of the link.
Taiwan's Power Quotient International (PQI), which claims it has more than ten years of experience making solid state drives (SSDs), will display its range of SSDs, USB Flash Drives, Memory Modules and Flash Memory Cards at the CES show next week, including four new SSD products. The debuts will include the 1.8-inch microSATA SSD S518, Express Card SSD S520, 2.5-inch SATA II SSD S525 and eSATA Combo Card S530. The S518 and S525 offer up to 128GB capacities, with the former meant for use in notebooks while the latter offers two interfaces for use inside or outside of computers.
