What is the point of this...

[Rob Williams]

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/13/ultra-spacestation-6-offers-up-12gb-flash-drive-six-pack/

Ultra has unveiled a new product... it's a "Space Station". It will include six small thumb drives, 2GB a piece, and each can be "docked".

My question is, what? What in the heck is the point of this? Who wants to deal with 6 different thumb drives at a given time? Give me a solid 16GB drive any day.

It would be cooler if this "station" could be plugged into the computer, but it can't.

 

[Greg King]

I have one of these. It's call a "USB hub".

I think he said it the best.

 

[sbrehm72255]

I don't see the point really, like you said, if it can't be connected to the computer, its pretty much worthless except to store a bunch of tiny flash drives.

 

[Greg King]

So instead of a hub, it's simply an ugly case for a set of thumb drives. Coming from Ultra though, it's not surprising considering they have fringe products like this all over their site.

 

[Rob Williams]

Yeah... just purchase ONE big thumb drive and keep it on your keychain. Then you'll always know where it is.

What a ridiculous product.

 

[BlindMonk]

[innuendo]I'll dock my thumb drives wherever I please.[/innuendo]

 

[Kougar]

Only application I could think of might be a student computer lab, or some kind of general meeting where everyone can grab a thumb drive with copies of the data or something.

 

[sbrehm72255]

Only application I could think of might be a student computer lab, or some kind of general meeting where everyone can grab a thumb drive with copies of the data or something.

That'd be about the only real use I could think of..................

One large flash drive would serve me much better than 6 small ones for sure.

 

[slugbug]

I doubt they'll sell many of these.

 

[werty316]

Looks like Ultra Products will make anything these days.

 

[FISH]

Maybe for RAID?

 

[moon111]

USB Flash Drives are very handy when wanting to cart information around. The problem many face is keeping things in order. The SpaceStation is built by a company named Ultra and has 6 USB flash drive slots on the back of it. The SpaceStation is credit card sized and acts as a USB hub where 6 of their drives connect in to it. Each drive can store 2GB of data making a total of 12GB of storage on the SpaceStation being made available.

Unfortunately the drives do not show up as one large drive, but rather, just show up as six individual drives. So you do not forget what is on each drive, a bunch of labels have been provided to label up the contents such as a “music” drive, “video” drive etc…

When I read this, it seems to be a small credit card size hub. Like stated I don't see any benefit over a single large usb thumb drive.

 

[Rob Williams]

So essentially, it's two things. If it IS indeed a hub, then it's a credit card sized 12GB flash drive. I'd much rather a 16GB thumb drive that probably costs much less than what this will retail for.

If it acts as a USB RAID, then it would become a little more unique, but it's size is still foolish compared to a regular thumb drive. Not to mention, if it's NOT a RAID (which I'm sure it isn't), plugging it in would create six new drives on your machine... seems like far too much work for no real benefit.