M-Systems Promises 128GB DiskOnKey by 2010

M-Systems today boasts its new 8GB DiskOnKey with no mentions of any speed increase. Maybe we've to wait until their new RSIC for any performance boost. But their announcement reminds us how far they've the NAND industry has come. In 2000, the Israeli-company brought us a 8MB flash drive; now, a little over 5 years later, we're getting a 8GB - 1000 times the capacity of the original DOK.

Now, Dov Moran CEO of M-Systems asks us to picture how it would be like to have a USB stick with 128GB capacity, a 32GB U3 Smart Drive, or a 64GB military-grade encryption thumbdrive. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out even 50MB/s wouldn't be enough to fill up this drive in a timely fashion. So, let's hope Certified Wireless USB 2.0 will reach in excess of 1Gbps by 2010 to match the speeds of future NAND. We would also need fuel-cell battery too to power both WUSB chip and memory.

And in related story, DiskOnKey just made it to the top 50 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years in PC World.