Hi-speed USB2 Flash Drive Round-Up

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a USB 2.0 Flash drive review featuring 8 drives from different manufacturers. What's so interesting about the review is that not all Flash drives are created equal. Some have very unique features while some are clearly better than others. They also took a detailed look inside one of the drives as well as put two drives in a RAID-0 array (a la Mac OS X). Now that's cool!"

Re:Putting USB flash drives...

[garcia]

If you are planning on using them to write a large amount of data (here they used 500mb) for easy transport, I don't see why you wouldn't use a software RAID configuration.

It is well known that software RAID usually produces about 2x the speed that you would have w/a traditional setup. USB drives aren't exactly fast as it is (2.0 is getting there though).

I know plenty of people that use several 256MB drives to carry their data around. If RAID was this easy on any platform I would suggest they do the same thing.

Re:OS X Raid Array

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID array is redundant in too many ways, please stop writing it, all RAIDs are arrays, it's part of the acronym.

Redundant
ARRAY of
Independent
Drives

It's like having at ATM machine: Automatic Teller Machine machine, or NIC card Network Interface Card card.

And yes, I may be pedantic, but I'd rather be pedantic than look like an idiot.

Re:Putting USB flash drives...

[swb]

It's not a terrible idea, in fact, it'd be cool if there was a RAID-5-type redundancy built into the storage device itself so that flash failures wouldn't shitcan the entire data store.

Re:Which is which?

[ericspinder]

I always thought it was funny that the "full speed" wasn't actually USB 2.0's full speed, but more like one-fiftieth speed.

Typical short sighted naming problem. Full speed, was the "full speed" of the older spec, but now we have hi-speed thanks to the 2.0 spec. So for USB 3.0 we'll have "super speed" (or whatever they call it) ,as well as supporting "hi-speed", "full speed" and "low speed". The real problem is that they can call a drive "USB 2.0" and only support up to the "full speed" of the 1.0 spec.

Size?

[genka]

This review failed to test one practical side effect of a physical size: when a given device is plugged in a one of stacked USB ports, is the other one still accessable?

Re:Reliablity?

[SquadBoy]

As a floppy replacement they are great. I've had mine since the middle of Janurary. My kids have gotten ahold of it a few times and it has survived that I used to carry it in my pocket now I just carry it in my bag it seens to work fine. But here is the thing that you mentioned that is just what it is a a floppy/burning less than 256 meg to a cd replacement. For example I use mine to carry music between work and home. I use it to grab config files off of machines that are on another network/domain. I use it for putting VPN clients on lusers machines that aren't on the network. In short I use it for temporary storage and transfer where doing it that way is faster/easier than doing it over the network. Sometimes I do it just to impress chicks. :) But I would never use it for long term storage of anything I care about and don't have in another spot, they just aren't designed for that. But then again back in the day I know plenty of folks who would do just that with floppies.

Wish I could get work to buy me another one. :) Count your blessings.