CES 2011: Outlook on Mobile Storage Trends

CES, one of the world's largest consumer technology product trade shows and the best choice for all consumer electronics, personal computers, communication products and understanding industry trends, just ended in Las Vegas, the famous gambling city of the United States, at the beginning of the year. We can clearly see that NAND flash memory performed particularly well at this CES, and manufacturers demonstrated its increasingly important role in mobile phones and various storage-related products.

　　UHS-II Standard Product Display

　　In 2011, it is predicted that flash memory cards will become one of the fastest growing mobile storage products. The SD Card Association also exhibited the new UHS-II (Ultra High Speed-II) bus specification at CES 2011, which enables the SD bus interface to read and write at a speed of 312MB per second. This new specification is the SD 4.0 standard. Since the development of UHS-I last year, the bus interface speed has tripled, and in the future it will reach twice the speed of UHS-II.

　　8GB SD card with Wifi function

　　Japan and China have also jointly developed "ServersMan@SD" which packs wireless LAN functions and Web server functions including a processor into one SD card. It is said that a machine equipped with an SD card slot can become a Web server or client on a LAN or the Internet by inserting this SD card.

　　USB 3.0 will be widely popularized in 2011

　　I believe that those who pay close attention to the mobile storage consumer market have already discovered that in 2010, any new product and technology release was overshadowed by another not-so-new technology product, that is USB 3.0. Last year can be said to be an important period for the mass launch of high-speed USB 3.0 mobile storage products, which brought the high-speed interface technology released as early as 2007 to our mainstream users overnight.

　　Currently, NEC is the only major USB3.0 chip manufacturer

　　As the amount of data storage we need increases, USB2.0 has become exhausted, and the fastest external interface, eSATA, requires additional power supply, which is inconvenient to use. USB3.0 integrates multiple advantages, making it an inevitable trend of the development of the times to become the next-generation standard interface. It just seems to be a little slow, and of course, we expect it to be faster.

　　Moreover, with the release of Intel's new generation Sandy Bridge platform P67/H67 chipset, more and more new motherboards launched by mainstream motherboard manufacturers are equipped with USB3.0 interfaces, and in the next year, Intel and AMD will also launch native USB3.0 motherboards, which is the most important step to promote the popularization of USB3.0. Users who are installing new computers can choose motherboards with USB3.0 interfaces, buy USB3.0 mobile hard drives or USB flash drives to directly enter the USB3.0 era and enjoy the advantages brought by high speed.

　　USB3.0 interface motherboards are increasingly available

　　Mobile hard disk and USB flash drive have high capacity and high speed

　　The current mobile hard disk and USB flash drive technology has basically reached its limit and is difficult to improve. The only thing that can continue to improve is capacity and speed, and speed must rely on the USB3.0 mentioned above. As for capacity, it will continue to increase with the continuous improvement of laptop hard disk/desktop hard disk capacity.

　　Western Digital Scorpo Blue 1TB Laptop Hard Drive

　　The largest laptop hard drive currently has a capacity of 1TB, and many 2.5-inch mobile hard drives with a capacity of 1TB have been launched, but the current price is not acceptable to users. Major hard drive manufacturers have already launched 3TB desktop hard drives, which also marks the entry into the era of 750GB single-disk platters in 2011. Products like 250GB and 320GB will gradually fade out of the market, and mobile hard drives with a capacity of 500GB and 640GB will become the mainstream in the future.

　　Creative concept USB products

　　In terms of USB flash drives, the popularity of 16GB and 32GB USB flash drives with larger capacity will be a trend in the future. 4GB and 8GB products will also be eliminated in 2011. Currently, various USB flash drives such as USB capless, push-pull, rotating, and folding have emerged one after another, and there will be more and more such USB flash drives in the future. The manufacturer that can innovate and design a unique and novel appearance product will occupy the market share.

　　Corsair Flash Padlock 2 Keyboard Encrypted USB Drive

　　In the final analysis, the development of mobile hard disks and USB flash drives must be based on the premise that the speed can be improved, and the capacity can only be increased. At present, the turtle-like speed of USB2.0 can no longer meet the transmission needs of large capacity, and the speed can only rely on the rapid popularization of USB3.0 interface. In addition, in order to meet the needs of every user for the security of private data, additional functions such as hard/soft encryption, data security protection, anti-virus and anti-virus will become a must-have option for every mobile storage product in 2011.