Just hours ago, COMPUTEX Taipei 2015 opened its doors, but as always in these cases, companies tend to make high-profile announcements before the convention formally begins. This time it's SanDisk, which has unveiled the smallest 128-gigabyte USB drive and the world's fastest portable SSDs.
Let's set aside for a moment the noise about Windows 10, and explore some hardware news. From today until next Saturday, the 2015 edition of COMPUTEX will be held in Taipei, a true classic among exhibitions. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Intel was in the middle of its keynote, but who brings us together today is not the giant from Santa Clara, but SanDisk, another titan of storage. Last March we talked about its microSD card with 200 gigabytes of capacity, which demonstrates a very important advance in miniaturization. Now it's time for two new products, a USB drive and a series of SSDs that have conquered different records.
On the USB drive side, it's the SanDisk Ultra Fit with USB 3.0 interface and a capacity of 128 gigabytes. Although the market already offers USB drives and cards with that space, the difference is that the Ultra Fit is 19.1 millimeters long, 15.9 millimeters wide, and only 8.8 millimeters thick, dimensions similar to a 10-cent US coin. Being so compact will allow many users not only to have a high-capacity portable solution, but also to turn the SanDisk Ultra Fit into a permanent drive for many computers. The read speed in USB 3.0 mode reaches 130 megabytes per second, and as for its price, it's said to be 120 dollars.
As for SSDs, SanDisk presented its Extreme 900 line of portable drives, with a top model offering 1.92 terabytes of capacity. This SSD is accompanied by two smaller brothers, one with 960 gigabytes and a more economical one with 480 gigabytes. In all cases, SanDisk reports maximum speeds of 850 megabytes per second through a USB 3.1 interface, nine times faster than an equivalent portable hard drive. Obviously, such speed has its price. The Extreme 900 with 1.92 terabytes will be available for a chilling 999 dollars. The 960-gigabyte version costs 599 dollars, and the 480 GB one is at 399 dollars.
