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?"
If the original poster goes the route of buying a USB reader and swapping cards in and out, Lexar recently announced CF chips with a 4G capacity. (If you have to ask, you can't afford it).
One issue with CompactFlash is that changing bits in one direction is fast and simple, but going the other direction requires a relatively slow erase cycle on an entire block of memory. Then on top of that, the number of erase cycles the part can survive is limited, on the order of 1E5 or 1E6. Lexar advertises smart controller firmware that remaps addresses to level out the load of erasures. In other words, if you toggle address $0F00 a zillion times, $0F00 may reach a different physical address each time so that no one block on the chip goes through a zillion/2 erase cycles.
I don't know how well other vendors handle it. Any CompactFlash nerds here today?
There are two things you want to do here. You want to be able to boot your laptop from a removable medium, and you want to transfer data to other systems. I don't see why you have to have a single solution for both. Maybe it's kewl to have a bootable USB key or SD card, but is it practical? Booting from external media is not something you have to do very often, but when you do have to do it, you really have to do it. So you need something reliable. Almost all recent systems can boot from the CD, so why not just burn all the boot images you might need onto CD? Or if you just have to have a read-write bootable device, get a USB floppy. (You'll probably have to buy one from the manufacturer of your laptop to get one that's bootable.) It's old-fashioned, and it isn't good for any serious data transfer, but it's very reliable. And you need reliable.
The second problem is data transfer. Now, the main merit of a USB key is portability. But if your data is already on a laptop, you already have portability. If you want to transfer data between your laptop and another system, why spend a lot of money on a USB key, which requires multiple steps to accomplish the transfer? It's faster and cheaper just to connect the two USB ports directly.
If you're interested in trying to get Linux running off a USB flash device, have a look at Puppy Linux.
I'm still not convinced that their move from WindowLab to FVWM95 as the default window manager was that clever though. Have they not seen the size of that thing?