$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club
Imagine that your USB flash drive came with software that lets an unknown cloud platform scan its contents and upload files, inform your friends about whatever you publish, and then them download your stuff for themselves.
Got that picture in your head? Then you've just imagined the concept behind USB Club and the $180, 1TB SSD "Transport" drive it made available yesterday.
There's little in the way of specs to justify Transport's $180 price tag, with the only figure given on USB Club's website a mention of being able to transfer "5GBs in 15sec," equaling about 341 MB/s. That means the drive appears to offer speeds similar to USB 3.0 - nowhere near justifying paying state-of-the-art prices for it.
The Transport is also really small, and cased in plastic. As anyone who's used an external SSD knows, they can run quite hot and it's not apparent what sort of thermal management is built into the keychain-sized object. Despite USB Club's claims, this is a pint-sized SSD; we suspect it's really just a regular old flash drive.
That hasn't stopped interested buyers, who've apparently run through several batches of the things, though it's not clear how many were in each batch. A screenshot from the order page shared yesterday showed that there were 8 items remaining in Batch 2; as of writing, Batch 5 is now on sale, and the site shows eight items in that batch as well.
