Slashdot Mirror
Best USB Flash Storage?
Jennifer asks: "I'm thinking of making the plunge and buying some sort of USB flashdisk. I just migrated to a laptop without a floppy, and want some sort of quick and easy medium, preferably bootable, for moving files around. My idea solution would be a SDcard reader that is small, bootable, Hi-Speed USB and sleek/sexy. SD based means I could have a number of cards ready to go, such as a linux card, a Win98 card, maybe even a Win2k card if I could pare the install down to 256MB, plus other stuff, including compatibility with my Palm.
Is booting purely BIOS dependent? What have your experiences been with these things?"
I believe that booting off of a USB port is BIOS dependent since it needs to be able to not only detect that the USB drive is a storage drive but also have a stack to use it like a hard drive or what-not.
For instance, I am able to boot off of a USB memory key and a USB Zip drive on an IBM ThinkPad X20/X21, but not a T21. I haven't tried it on the A series or any of the newer T series.
Unless your laptop is very new, it probably will not be able to boot from the removable USB storage. Check to see if it is an option in the boot order within the BIOS. If not, then you're out of luck, unless there is a BIOS upgrade that enables it.
...
You started by asking about a USB flashdisk, which I interpretted as meaning a USB "memory key" of some type.
... umm ... basically I have no idea if this post is even on topic.
... it runs on an original Pentium 100 MHz CPU (floating point bug included at no extra charge). I was overjoyed when I realized that this older (yet very well designed laptop) could boot off a "new" technology Compact Flash card simply by using a PCMCIA PC Card adapter. That ability breathed even more life into an old laptop.
But then you started talking about flash cards, so
If you went with, for example, Compact Flash, you'll have the advantage of being able to use a PC Card adapter. I have little experience with laptops, but I suspect that while you may find the ability to boot off a USB-connected flash card is rare, the ability to boot off a PC Card of some type (or a device connected through a PC Card adapter) is more common. (At about $15 with little effort searching, PC Card adapters are also very cheap.)
Case in point, I have an ancient IBM ThinkPad 560. It's 7 years old I believe
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Watch out -- SD is slllllllllllllloooooooowwwwww. Other flash formats are faster, but they're still really not suitable for running an OS from.
A 16mb SD card came with my Palm m500. On the back of the card:
So, MMC is definitely better in this regard.
BTW, the MMC card reader that came with my RCA CC-9390 DVC camcorder works under Linux with the standard USB drivers. It talks SCSI over USB and then the card has a x86 boot sector and partition table indicating a FAT filesystem. It all works. I was quite surprised and impressed.
I don't know if a SD card reader would work under Linux due to all the DRM crapola. I don't know of any open SD reader/writer drivers. There's a closed one for one of the Linux PDAs however.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Flash chip technology advances have allowed flash chips to achieve sustained data transfer rates of 5-7MB/sec
I beleive USB 1.1 supports a rate of 12MB/s so it looks anything more (like the 480MB/s of USB 2) wouldn't really help you.
I tend to like compact flash the best of any of the competeing memory standards currently. Once you get that small size doesnt really matter that much to me. It is definitly the cheapest, available in the largest sizes, and from everything I have heard it is by far the most durable.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
I would strongly suggest using CompactFlash rather than SD. It's faster (no dealing with DRM), and is basically ATAPI: with a $5 reader, you can plug it directly into any ATAPI-compatible computer and boot just like a hard drive. Plus, if you've got your heart set on a full Win2K and Office XP install, Microdrives come in sizes up to 1 GB (although you lose the durability of flash; they're just tiny hard drives in a CompactFlash form factor). Plus, a quick trip to Pricewatch says that CompactFlash is about half the price of SD for any given size, and is availible in a wider range of sizes. You might lose Palm compatability, but, at least to my eye, the benefits outweigh that one loss.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
The current maximum size of a MMC is 128MB, but most likely you can only find 64MB cards on the market, on the other hand you can easily find a 1GB SD card.
Don't forget that your Palm is already a SD card reader. Just install Palm desktop on multiple machines then you can easily transfer files between them. Oh if you can a Tungsten T or Tungsten C, you can even transfer the files wirelessly.
Are you doing this?
In addition to UDF, you need packet write, both "experimental." The packet write stuff I've been able to find seems badly dated. (>12-18 months) Plus it seems to be drive-dependent whether you can do it even with patches.
Do you have some more up-to-date links you could share?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'd also consider an XDrive II - it's a multiformat digital media reader that also can accept a hard drive. It comes in USB2.0 various flavors. (Bare or with internal HD)
I use the XDrive II in my daily routine. You don't have to have a computer to offload digital media onto the internal hard drive as their is a copy button on the drive with a little LCD indicating status.
IF you have to wait for a thumb drive -- a 1 gig + SD/MMC/XD reader of the Lexar Pro+ Jumpdrive is due out early next year. Also SD is being promised at 1 gig about that time and XD is promised to be 3 gig by the end of 2004. So if you don't like the XDrive suggestion, wait for this drive.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Most newer motherboard will support USB device bootup, but not all devices will work. Both USB flash drives we reviewed didn't. A CF card with a reader is the way to go, imo. Blatent site spam, but you can look here: http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/mem_store.shtml
Furthermore, a 256 Meg USB2 drive is cheaper than a new burner.
:)
Really? OfficeDepot (or maybe OfficeMax) just had a 40x CD-RW for free. And you can get them for $20-40 without any rebates or any other hassle. The 256MB USB2 Flash cards have come way down in price, but they're not that cheap yet.
Of course, that's not usable in a notebook
If your burner is slow then your drive is either outdated or you have bad software... modern -RW's run at 32x and can rewrite a full CD in 3 mins. Flash memory is insanely slow in writing, so you'd probably be about even in overall time.
All of that said, I do think a USB dongle device would be more convienent and easier to deal with than CD's -- smaller, easier to change, etc. -- but I had to correct your statement.
Well those dongle drives come in sizes up to 4 GB but they are only economical up to the 256-512 MB range. If that is enough for you, then go for it!
You can also get USB enclosures for 2.5" notebook hard drives. Get one, put a 20G drive in it and carry it around.
For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.
Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.
A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.
And no, I don't work for Lexar Media.