USB Flash Drive Life Varies Up To 10 Times 192
Lucas123 writes "Differences in the type of memory and I/O controllers used in USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo, according to a Computerworld story. While a slow USB drive may be fine for moving a few dozen megabytes of files around, when you get into larger data transfers, that's when bandwidth contrictions become noticeable. In 2009, controller manufacturers are expected to begin shipping drives with dual- and even four-channel controllers, which will increase speeds even for slower drives."
What does speed have to do with life? (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought everyone knew this (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought everyone knew that you get what you pay for, both speed and durability.
I have found also that the drives marked ReadyBoost usually mean they're among the faster drives.
Dual Channel is already available (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I copied a 700 MB file onto it from a local hard drive in gnome, which reported initially that it was transferring at 20+ MB/s, but that dropped steadily until it levelled off around 6.1 MB/s.
Far from scientific, yes, but I wonder a)why the inconsistencies, and b)how these results compare with other products.
db
Re:Flimsy construction (Score:5, Interesting)
This does remind me of what a geek I am though. I think I must be the only person in the world who often daydreams (when I have the time and inclination to daydream) that I've gone back in time and taken some piece of modern computer equipment to shock and amaze people from the early days of computing.
For example, I'll daydream that I've taken my laptop (which is now a few years old and not impressive to anybody, but with 768 MB of RAM, a 40 GB disk, and 1.4 Ghz Pentium M, would have blown the socks off of a computer enthusiast from, say, 1969) back in time and am showing it off to a group of scientists like at say that famous "mother of all demos" where the mouse and graphical interface were first demoed.
Can you imagine showing up and being like, hey check this out. That 64 KB PDP-11 that you have running your demo is cool and all. But let me show you my computer, which has 768 MILLION bytes of RAM! And a 1400x1050 32 bit color flat panel LCD display! With built-in keyboard!
It's not that I would lord it over anyone. But it's fun (for me) to daydream about the conversations you'd have with someone from 1969, explaining to them the advances of modern technology and how they are used in our world.
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that, because although a 2 GB flash drive today is totally ho-hum, if you could sneak one of those back in time to the 1970's, you'd have something that governments would probably go to war over
Like I said, I am a total geek
Re:Flash MP3 player (Score:5, Interesting)
Thumb Drive with flexible neck (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pauses when running from flash drive (Score:3, Interesting)
db
Re:Thumb Drive with flexible neck (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Flimsy construction (Score:5, Interesting)
And they would say
You need how many megs to say "Hello World"?
...and I look at the ledger system for the bank where I'm working which uses 3270 sessions. Yes, even though the documentation refers to this as a GUI, hello 1972, your character mode VDU [wikipedia.org] is still haunting us.
Brand name is no guarantee (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem with english language, not FSF (Score:4, Interesting)
Latin languages doesn't have this problem, and there's no "free vs. free" ambiguity. Thus nobody speaking those languages has the impression that FSF is playing with words.
Besides, exFAT still costs money to the user, as Vista SP1's license explicitly requires that the user has bought a valid license for Vista, which almost never costs zero, except if the user got it through some channels as MSDNAA.
Perhaps more of concern for other form factors? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that compact flash for cameras varies in price and performance. The purportedly good ones get marketed as Ultra, High-Speed, etc. Interesting to note that there is a technical difference as dramatic as SLC vs MLC that could be cited, but I never recall it being touted as a selling point for high-end cards. One might not care so much about a thumb drive being fast and reliable given the use pattern, but if one is laying down images in a war zone, or in a ball game (or even in a delivery room) one kind of wants the best when the data are unique.
As someone who cares a lot about his pictures I would pay a premium for an SLC compact flash card or an SD card; that is, provided I was assured of the difference. To date I have gone for a high price on cards, but have not always gotten what I payed for. I think it would be worth it to out the specs of some of these cards. Some savvy marketer might do well by touting the SLC spec for some applications.
Anyone know about any compact flash or SD cards that use SLC?
My version doesn't involve scientists, but kids... (Score:5, Interesting)
(And yes, I too have wandered down that sunny Day Dream avenue from time to time.)
You have to be about seven or eight years old, about six months after Star Wars came out and the best computer game available is "Pong" which takes up an entire counsel unit and is still pretty cool. Anyway, you have to show up one day at your friend's house or at school; some place where there's a handful of kids but no adults, and you have to have a modern laptop with you. You explain that it's a new Star Wars toy that they're testing but which hasn't "come out" yet, and that your Dad managed to bring one of the test units home from "the office". Nobody's sure if he really let you have it or if you're going to get in trouble when he finds out. Either way, that's incidental, because everybody is jostling to see what the heck it is you have on the table. It looks like it might have actually been IN a Star Wars film, that's for sure.
Then you crack open the lid and power it up, and muck around with the interface for a while. This should be sufficient to blow your audience away since things like GUI's and mouse pointers haven't been invented yet. --Flat screens which have better color and resolution than any TV set around are also new; just the sort of thing you'd expect a really expensive Star Wars toy to have. You might also want to pull the luminescent CD out of the Star Wars game package and put it in the extending CD tray. --Because Walkman-size consumer electronics have also not been invented, so just the size of the mechanics should also blow your friends away. Not to mention the Buck Rogers CD, (I still think the CD is a dead giveaway that we're all actually living in a low budget sci-fi movie of the week, but anyway. .
Then you start playing the Star Wars game. Music, sound effects, interface, it all looks better even than the best coin-op video game at the mall. A LOT better. You play this for about five or ten minutes, letting your friends have short tries before you suddenly have to go home because your Dad called and you need to bring the game back. And then it is never seen again. Until thirty years later, that is. --The stories which will circulate will not be taken seriously by parents, and yet a handful of kids will be jazzed beyond belief and will be scoping out Department Store Catalogs for the rest of their natural childhoods.
I had a friend who came back from Japan once with a fold-up robot toy which was lightyears ahead of anything our Western toy makers had ever produced. It was one of the coolest days of my entire life. I just picture that day times ten.
-FL
Re:Linux runs pretty well on my cheap flash drive (Score:2, Interesting)
1980s (Score:3, Interesting)
The mainframe I first worked on did NOT have a card reader, which was odd at the time for the series (NCR Criterion V-series). It had 1MB of memory per CPU, and the two hosts shared a bank of 6 disks, each 500MB (total of 3 GB).
Now, my laptop has a CPU with dual cores, 1GB of memory, and 160GB of disk. Oh, and my cell phone has a microSD card with 2GB on it that is less than my thumbnail size.
Apache with PHP and few PHP scripts (Drupal modules) start at 17MB, while that mainframe had a maximum of 16MB that could fit in it. One could run Linux with X11 and fvwm in 64MB comfortably. Now with KDE, kubuntu would not boot 128MB (or was it 256MB, can't remember).
15 years down the road we would be talking terabytes of storage in your key ring.