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Kanguru Releases First FireWire Flash Drive

Kanguru Releases First FireWire Flash Drive

by , 1:05 AM EDT, September 10th, 2004

At long last, after years of USB having a corner on the flash drive market, Kanguru has announced its Fire Flash FireWire flash drive line. With capacities ranging from 128MB to 1GB, the Fire Flash is the perfect way to carry your data with you, and since they uses FireWire, you won't be waiting around for the transfer to finish. From Kanguru:

Kanguru Solutions today announced the release of a ground breaking new technology, the first FireWire (IEEE1394) Flash Drive, a high speed 3 inch portable firewire drive.

Starting at $69, the new Kanguru Fire Flash, patent pending, is available in capacities ranging from 128MB to 1GB and utilizes a 6-pin FireWire connection (but comes with a 4-pin adapter) offering high speed data transfer rates in a palm sized package. Like its USB flash drive counterpart, the Kanguru Fire Flash can be easily plugged into a FireWire port and automatically recognized by a computer for instant plug and play access. Additionally, it comes with a desktop docking station for added convenience.

“The Kanguru Fire Flash takes personal storage to a new level, offering cross platform storage with both Macintosh and Windows Operating Systems. Its pocket-sized design makes it an excellent storage solution for mobile users and frequent travelers. With the release of this product Kanguru Solutions again sets a new standard for portable storage,” said Nate Cote, vice president of product management for Kanguru Solutions.

The Kanguru Fire Flash is available now at prices ranging from US$69.95 for the 128MB model to US$279.95 for the 1GB model.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:AFCdtLoeb Posts: 2533 Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Subject:

What's the word on speed? I'm not quite sure about USB uses 1.1 or 2.0 but I'm not sure if being able to throw a 2 Meg photo on in half the time is worth the price increase.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Thank God

I've been waiting for this type of product for some time now. My Powerbook doesn't have USB 2 and having to wait 7 to 10 minutes for a 256 MB flash drive to fill is not worth it. This is a good sign. Hopefully, more companies will jump on this and force prices down. Why did it take so long to come though?

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Why not an iPod?

Why would you spend $279 for a 1GB flash drive when you could spend $299 and get an iPod with 20GB of storage? Will an iPod mount on a Windows machine like it does on a Mac?

Close Name:AFCdtLoeb Posts: 2533 Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Subject: Re: Why not an iPod?

Quote
Anonymous wrote:
Why would you spend $279 for a 1GB flash drive when you could spend $299 and get an iPod with 20GB of storage? Will an iPod mount on a Windows machine like it does on a Mac?

Yes. Upon opening "My Computer" it is right there next to the CD's, the main drive, the floppy, etc.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: This Is Faster Than iPod

From the MacLife website:

"Here's the main reason you might want to spend the extra money on a FireWire 400 flash drive such as the Fire Flash: It took 90 seconds to copy a 700MB video file to the Fire Flash, compared to the 8 minutes, 40 seconds it took to copy the same file to a USB 2.0 thumb drive. That's a huge speed advantage for FireWire."

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