LaCie touts tough truck-resistant flash drive for tough guys
Laughs in face of pressure, heat, water; has actual hairy chest
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LaCie is bringing out a USB flash drive that can withstand being run over by a 10-ton truck.
The XtremKey comes inside a metal pipe, the walls of which are 2mm thick, made from a zinc, aluminium, magnesium and copper alloy called zamac. The pipe is sealed with an O-ring and wear-resistant screw threads.
LaCie claims it's tough enough to resist five metre drops, to function in a +200oC to -50oC temperature range, and be watertight up to 100m of depth.
It is around three inches long, has a USB 2.0 interface, and comes with 8 to 64GB capacity. A distracting aspect of its planned appeal is that it wobbles on the desk - designed that way by LaCIe, which says it has a "playful personality".
The XtremKey will be available in August priced from $49.99 in LaCie's online store, for those who really feel their rough-and-tumble lifestyle requires it. ®
COMMENTS
psi
A bit of mental rithmatic...
10 ton(ne) truck
assume 6 wheels, equally distributing weight => 1.67 tonne/wheel
assume approximately 12"x9" of tyre-ground contact area per wheel (~100sq.in.)
=> 17kg/sq.in or 37psi
(OK, I expect a truck would have lower tyre pressure than that, but I'm feeling generous)
This thing is 3 inches long, and looks to be about 1" across; so with these figures, that's about 51kg that it can support.
In other words; it can just about support a skinny woman stood on it. Or half a decent sized bloke.
Sounds much less impressive than a '10-ton truck'
Zamac, huh?
Ohh, goodie, more Zamac.
Cheap garbage alloy used for castings which crack, oxidize like mad, have a low melting point and are generally trash. Think cheesy chromed trim parts on old cars (before they discovered plastic was even cheaper).
Start with a billet of stainless steel and you might have something.
In the latter part of WW2, they developed electronic parts which were literally shot out of cannons - anti-aircraft proximity fuses. Now THESE were tough . . . and they even had vacuum tubes (valves, for you guys) in them. These would take several thousand G's and still work.
Zamac? We don' need no steenkin' Zamac . . . Zamac is for wimps.
it wobbles on the desk - a "playful personality"
I knew a girl like that.
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