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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.
You mentioned that you want to use the usb drive as a replacement for a floppy. What about using your cdrw drive instead? At a buck a pop, cdrw's are much cheaper than flash storage, and with udf filesystem, you can random write to them. If size is a problem, I've seen those 210 meg mini cdr/cdrw's at varisous computer shows (although I don't understand why they cost more than a full size cd). Get a bunch of those, and if you need cases, you can get Gamecube cases (same size disk), and they'll fit in your shirt pocket.
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.
Some USB Flash memories allow Password Protection. Is there Linux support for this feature? A Manufacturer says it only works on Windows, but I find it hard to believe that noone has used that.
get 7 free Japanese lessons.
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.
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.
I have booted off my USB2.0/Firewire Asus (SCB-1608-D) DVD-ROM/CDr/CD-RW drive though. It's a very nice drive and I recommend it highly and often. The Asus drive I've even gotten to mount under PS2 Linux and it comes with a handy little carry bag.
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.
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.
First, fuck "Secure Digital" media. All that means is that it is DRM-enabled.
I got a USB flash drive that is also an MP3 player. It needs no drivers. It's not fancy in any way, but it's pretty cool and less than a hundred bucks for 128mb. It's the "Apacer Audio Steno."
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?
with 256mb. It is sub $100 in price and works great.
/s the disk and make a bootable USB with any OS you want on it. (Lexar swears up and down that it is not bootable though.)
Even better, many systems detect it when booting to DOS even though it isn't the boot device, which allows you to format
I've installed Win98 on it as well. Works like a champ!
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
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.