Flash Drive Roundup 311
Braedley writes "When [Ars] last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70--not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"
When they appear in cereal boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
that will relegate them to such a commodity status.
They are close to the perfect method for distribution of free computer programs/art/etc. Who needs AOL discs anymore! We can have a generation of usb key users. Of course I get lots of them from vendors in all shapes and forms, some are actually useful (led flash light, key holder, etc)
1994 Floppy Disc (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like they have the same status as the floppy disc did 15 years ago.
Not just a commodity, a necessity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, pretty much,,, (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, pretty much, except that I really would like for them to make *metalic* end clips for where you tie the little string or where you clip it onto your key chain that don't break! The vast majority of them have crappy plastic ends that always end up breaking.
I should also mention that I like the unadvertized feature (bonus!) that many of these USB sticks can now survive washing machine cycles, if you just give them a few hours to dry when they come out of your wet pant pockets.
I would also like to see manufacturers spend an extra 1/1000th of a pennny and simply write on the outside of the USB stick the read/write speeds of the internal memory; granted if it exceeds USB2 max theoretical read/write it's somewhat pointless, but hey.. USB3 is coming out right?
Lastly people, after you buy one, don't forget to format them with truecrypt, before you dump any files on them. I don't want to see my medical records or SIN number find its way to the unattended StarBucks coffee table.
Adeptus
cloud is better (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than maintain my regular pattern of buying and losing ever-larger USB drives, I've opted instead to pay $5 to a web host with FTP access. I get 120GB of storage, can assign a domain name or subdomain to any directory if I want to label some specific content, or I can set up something fancy like a PHP/SQL CMS or wiki if I want to keep things organized. This content is available to me anywhere with internet access.
I do keep a small USB drive in my pocket if I'm doing an important presentation and don't want to take a chance on shoddy web access. That's the only time I ever rely on a USB drive, though. I'm simply too clumsy to trust myself with gigs of data in my pocket. The cheaper storage gets, the more valuable the data in my pocket become!
Re:Warranty is a differentiating factor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Warranty is a differentiating factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Warranty is important for me when buying expensive stuff that's going to retain it's value. But large flash drives are cheap, and the technology is moving quickly. A 16GB flash drive costs a mere £20 now, and chances are that by the time it fails, I'll be able to buy something much larger and faster for the same price, so the warranty doesn't seem that important. Say you had a lifetime warranty on one of the $200 2GB drives mentioned in TFS and it failed, would you even bother getting a replacement 2GB drive now?
So in the write up, (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we get a nice compare and contrast of the rootkits and malware included on these drives?
Re:And... more abuse of moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
The question is whether flash drives are a commodity item. The answer is no, there is a vast difference between various flash drives and it is still necessary to do research before purchasing one if you don't want to get boned. My anecdote supports this assertion, and so it is clearly on-topic. The only comments I've posted or intend to post in this thread which are not on-topic are this one and its parent. Admittedly, that is 50% of them, but since the Slashdot management is not interested in hearing about abuses of their ill-conceived moderation system (the invitation to email complaints about same was removed from the FAQ long ago) the only recourse is to post a comment.
So far this has worked pretty well for me; the majority of the time, someone comes along and "corrects" their moderation by modding the comment back up into reality and letting natural forces take over. I have attracted mod trolls repeatedly, such activity is trivial to identify when you're on slashdot for long periods of time because the trolls are stupid and lazy and tend to just go look for your four or five weakest comments and dump on you.
The AVB flash drives OCZ is selling are defective by design, they can be written to by reading them, or something. MANY people have gotten bad replacements for their bad drives. They are simply NOT compliant devices! This information is germane to the discussion about whether flash drives have been commoditized! If the situation were any clearer my comment would be invisible.
Re:Will they ever be truly give-away items? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't like to use optical media in the same way - they aren't as re-usable so there's the environmental concern, they're easily scratched, you have to find a separate case to put them in (whereas 3.5" disks had their own protective casing). I used to have stacks of 3.5" disks lying around without ever having to go to the effort of buying them - cover disks, old software installation sets, we had about a hundred sets of Microsoft Office install media at my old work place that got wiped and re-labelled. What price are DVD-Rs nowadays? Last time I bought some I think they were about £1 each, which is almost throw-away price, but nowhere near the ubiquity of floppies.
Re:And... more abuse of moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry drinkypoo, but you actually are off topic here. You are going on a personal rant about OCZ. The topic is how flash media has become cheap and undifferentiated. Which is true. One flash stick is essentially the same as the other. You can usually swap out the flash memory in a jump drive and put it in another one. The only difference really is the same difference with any other commodity (including other undifferentiated ones) and that is a difference in manufacturing quality.
The "speed differences" are largely imaginary as the USB connection bottlenecks access times anyways. Things like customer support and warranties are factors for buying a specific brand of thumb drive but aren't qualities that differentiate the actual product as the products themselves are largely the same.
I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience with OCZ but complaining about Slashdot moderators isn't going to do any good anyways. Chances are by this afternoon you'll be +5 Insightful once someone who has also had a bad experience with OCZ gets in here. Of course given most people seem to have good experiences with OCZ its possible that you'll be a bit lower than +5 by the end of day.
This review doesn't make sense from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
Their list has three 16GB, three 4GB, one 2GB and one 1GB flash drives. How is that "mostly 4GB and 8GB"?
And the prices go from $10 to $56, how is that "from $9 to $30"? There's three drives over $30 listed, not to mention that only morons view $9.99 as being equal to $9 instead of $10.
Re:Dropbox (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure it's free but you get what you pay for. I'd rather pay a huge web host that isn't going anywhere for some open-ended FTP storage, than surrender my personal documents to a fly by night startup that could close shop any time!
Re:And... more abuse of moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
Commodity does not mean "perfect" and your anecdote does not actually tell us whether OCZ is bad or whether you got an unlucky batch. Without a statistical analysis, we don't know if there's any validity to your rants as far as predicting how future items will behave.
For most of us, fruits and vegetables are commodity items at the grocery, but you can still end up with a rotten or wormy item by chance. Some people might blame Dole (a supplier), or a grocery chain, or the local stock boy's handling, or the consumer's shopping skills/luck, or the consumer's handling of the fruit post-purchase. None of these actually make it less a commodity, and essentially all of them apply to your case as well.
Re:NO!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
it shat itself when I simply plugged it into my car stereo, which DOES NOT WRITE TO THE STICK
Before you blame the drive for that, take a voltmeter to that port. The port on my friend's car stereo kept killing drives, and I discovered that the port was putting out over 8 volts. Either the manufacturer can't figure out a $0.10 5V regulator or there's a bad ground or something.
Re:NO!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Your assertion that all OCZ drives are bad because you ran into two bad ones in a row suggests otherwise.
also:
People disagree with you and mod down your troll posts = Slashdot Moderation is broken
People post in an OCZ support forum that they are having problems = all OCZ drives are bad (hint: People who don't have a problem rarely post in support forums so I would expect to see a lot of complaints)
Maybe having a few less (or more?) drinkypoos would help you deal with this situation better.
Re:Not just a commodity, a necessity (Score:4, Insightful)
That phrase, was to be found nowhere on the web [google.com], until your own posting. Hardly ubiquitous.