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?"
OCZ Throttle (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm running this baby in eSATA mode as a system disk for my mediaserver (windows xp).
What I can say is that it is doing quite nicely. Sometimes I do get application lag (writes to small files, perhaps?) but overall performance is quite good.
I've had to reboot this machine once due to strange behaviour but since then it's been running non-stop. I think actual uptime is more than a month at this point. Perhaps several, even.
If they could get random writes up to par I'd really think about putting one of these in my work machine. Geek factor, you understand ;).
Ubiquitous... (Score:4, Interesting)
...that's the word you're looking for. They've become ubiquitous. Like cell phones and computers. Unfortunately, when a product becomes ubiquitos and many, many companies start making it, you're bound to run into a wide range of quality--both good and bad. I'm sure no one here disagrees that there are many more crappy, unreliable cell phones and computers on the market today than 10 years ago.
To say flash drives have become "cheap plastic tsotschke" is accurate now about 90% of the time. I try to avoid "house brands" of any electronics, though. These usually make up the 90% of cheap, goldfish-lifespanned crap being pushed out to the consumers.
Personally, my favorite flash drives are the plastic PNY ones with the rough, matte finish. It is one of the few drives I can attach to a keychain and not have it either destroyed or transformed into a scratched-up mess within a day. The rubberized X-Porter flash drives are nice too and can be bought at fairly reasonable prices considering their speed and quality.
At least we know this, once a product gets to this stage of its life-cycle, you know it's become an important part of society and the original inventors should be proud of themselves for producing such an innovative (at the time) idea. Thanks, "law of diminishing marginal utility"! We love you!
Re:OCZ Throttle (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope your system swap/paging files are not on the flash drive or you're going to wear it out in record time. You get a very finite number of writes and deletes on flash memory sectors and there's no faster way to reach that limit than to put a swap file on there.
If you have 3G service (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
And $60 per month to a 3G ISP so that you can access the FTP host from your laptop, right? I carry a USB drive so that I can use my laptop on the bus without having to pay for tetherable 3G service.
Re:Abuse of moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
All you want is waterproof?
USB drives are super cool like that. (No moving parts!)
All you need is a little 2-part epoxy.
Take apart your flash drive (any!) and simply coat the green / black components with as much epoxy as you can stuff into it's exterior shell..
Now, the cap, buy a thin o-ring from your local hardware store, using a knife or dremel, cut a very narrow groove around the inside of your cap. Carefully use epoxy (sparingly here!) to secure the o-ring..
This might not be 100% water proof, but I'm pretty sure it would be very water resistant.
-Cheers,
Cory!
LaCie iamaKey (Score:5, Interesting)
I did not see the LaCie iamaKey USB flash drive in the review, but I noticed on a Lifehacker post yesterday and thought it would be a perfect USB drive:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11225 [lacie.com]
I constantly have problems with flash drives breaking off my keychain. This would solve that issue and looks very durable. Probably will buy it today.
Will they ever be truly give-away items? (Score:5, Interesting)
10 years ago, I could give someone a file on a floppy disk and not worry about getting the disk back. I had an essentially unlimited supply of blank disks, you could get a stack of 10 for £1. Nowadays, I do have to worry about getting my USB stick back, as I only have three of them. I suspect that USB memory sticks will never really get to the same point that 3.5" floppy disks got to in that respect. The market value of, say, an 8MB memory stick might be similarly negligible, but no-one's making them.
Re:Times Have Changed (Score:1, Interesting)
Has anyone priced the 8 MB flash storage for the PS2 lately? They're still asking $20+ for the Sony branded ones. $20 for 8 MB??? Are you flipping kidding me??
Pet peeve (Score:5, Interesting)
Why won't anyone manufacture one with a white matte finish? That way they could be written on.
Re:They're in cereal boxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Damn! I remember buying one of the very first flash drives, back in about 2000 or so. $50 for an IBM-branded 8 MB. 8 Megs, no typo.
Re:When they appear in cereal boxes (Score:3, Interesting)
Why use a flash drive anymore when you can get an SD card reader and card for the same price?
What's in a name? (Score:3, Interesting)
So if we're agreed they're super-popular now, can we also agree on a name? USB stick, USB drive, pen drive, thumb drive. Just pick one! Where the hell did pen drive and thumb drive come from anyway?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
like, whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
One day I said to my 16-year-old daughter, "Hey, cute bracelet" and she says, "It's my flash drive [ipromo.com]."
I remember being amazed and a bit amused when you could get a Swiss Army knife with a USB drive. That was cool. But it's hard, and kind of interesting in weird sort of way, to see tech relegated to the fashion accessory of a teen girl.
No tools required (Score:3, Interesting)
;) This ain't rocket science. You want to waterproof something little, just put it in a condom and tie the end in a knot. Whether this is cost-effective or not depends on the price difference between your current USB drive and the fancy waterproof one, and the price of condoms over the expected use period (or how good you are at untying those knots).
Re:Yes, pretty much,,, (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:NO!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? That's extremely strange considering that the operating system and browser which I am using to type this message are running off of a 16GB OCZ Rally2 which I am holding in my hand. Here, I'll read what it says on the body, again ...
Yep: It still says OCZ Rally 2 16GB.
I can back up what "drsmithy" said - the read and write performance on these is excellent, which is why I chose it in the first place. If you want to be able to carry around a portable linux system with you, r/w speed matters a great deal. Ubuntu running off of my old no-name flash drive took about twice as long to boot up, and firefox would go inactive for a minute at a time, on a regular basis. Plus doing updates really, really sucked. Now, running off the Rally2, I rarely have any such problems.
Sandisk Micro and multi-partition support (Score:1, Interesting)
The Sandisk Micro drives have a feature which websites often discuss but absolutely no one in the open-source world has actually made use of, or tried to figure out:
The fact that the flash drive, when inserted fresh out-of-the-box or after being formatted with Sandisk U3 tools, appears as *two* separate drives: a read-only CD (around 20MBytes I think), and the rest being a standard R/W flash drive (usually FAT formatted).
"Who cares? Get that CD/U3 crap out of here" is the first response, until you take the time to point out to someone the beauty of it. Think about it: a flash drive that's been formatted in such a way where there are literally multiple CDs appearing to the BIOS or bootloader, so that you can have a flash drive that has a FreeBSD disc1 CD on it, a Ubuntu Linux CD image on it, a Windows CD on it, etc... Now think about how useful that would be in a multi-OS co-location environment.
I spent 3-4 weeks trying to accomplish what Sandisk appears to be doing out-of-the-box, and I can't for the life of me figure out how they're getting the USB flash drive to actually appear as two separate devices. There must be some kind of USB CD emulation layer in the microcode on the drive itself which formatting (with the Sandisk U3 tool) tickles.
If you format the flash drive using the famous HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (e.g. make your USB flash drive bootable), you lose this capability, and end up with a flash drive that appears as a USB hard disk. Good luck booting multiple OSes for installation that way, without pulling your hair out or horrible hackery involving Fart, err, I mean Bart's boot tools and a bunch of other crap that assumes you're making a single CD.
Anyone know how Sandisk is doing this, and if so, why isn't there software out there which can let you "partition your flash drive" into multiple CDs using ISO files?
Re:Abuse of moderation (Score:4, Interesting)