Both my parents grew up in the computer industry of the 1970s and 80s, and they told me stories of “hard drives” the size of washing machines that only held a few megabytes of data. Now you can carry around the Library of Congress in your pocket—especially if you have this teeny-tiny USB-C solid-state drive that holds up to 512 GB of data.
Sold by Japanese company SunEast, the drive is obviously intended for phones and tablets, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t plug it into a laptop or desktop and treat it like an incredibly miniscule flash drive. It’s just 20mm by 10.6mm (that’s 0.78 x 0.42 inches), not counting the actual USB-C head, and it operates at USB 3.2 Gen 1 speeds. That gives it a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 5 gigabits per second, though SunEast says it maxes out at 450 MB/s on read.
DigitalTrends notes that it doesn’t appear to be on sale yet, even in Japan, though it’ll come in 128/256/512 GB options when it does. SunEast does sell hardware internationally, so I hope this little fella makes its way to the wider market. I’m sure there are plenty of people looking to ditch a laptop for travel these days, and this would make it easier to take plenty of photos and videos at any destination.
