A Few Hundred Genomes in Your Pocket

By Matthew Dublin

Victorinox, makers of the world-famous Swiss Army Knife, have, surprisingly, been the first to offer a 1TB USB stick — the world's largest thumb drive. The USB stick comes with either just the thumb drive on its own or with a pair of scissors and a knife. The drive can be accessed via USB 2.0 and 3.0 or eSATA, has AES 256-bit ascription, and has a 48 x 96 dot monochrome LCD display with room enough to provide a device label or some indicator of the drive's contents.

The thumb drive, which was exhibited at this week's CES conference in Las Vegas, comes with a price tag of $2,000, so if you're the type of person who is apt to misplace their car keys often, you might want to skip this one.

In theory, you could stick roughly 340 human genomes on this drive — not including annotations and other data of course — which begs the question: Could snail mail as a data transfer method for research collaborations make a comeback? It would be a lot cheaper to send some USBs in a box compared with a crate of disk arrays or hard drives, and possibly quicker than uploading data to the cloud.

These USBs also sport some pretty formidable security. The drive immediately emails its owner if plugged into an unauthorized computer and if no reply is received from the owner, zaps the flash memory and deletes the data.