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?"

Comments

USB Booting

[questionlp]

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.

Re:USB Booting

[keesh]

You'll need a bios update for booting off USB on T, A and R series ThinkPads. Should be available on any TP with built-in USB ports (doesn't work if you're going via CardBus). I can boot off any USB stuff on a T30 (hit F12 at boot, Removable Devices -> Whatever).

Other alternatives

[tchuladdiass]

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.

Re:Other alternatives

[(trb001)]

The problem with CDRW is that when you take the discs to other computers, writing on them requires a CDRW drive. I thought about this too, I use the tiny (220Mb?) CDs to carry stuff to work since they fit in my shirt pocket, but I can't transfer anything from work to home because of no burner at work.

Ideally, I would like to find a USB type drive that's cheap, then buy two of them...one for work, one for home. Any suggestions here?

--trb

Re:Other alternatives

[Zathrus]

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.

PC card adapter?

[orangepeel]

You started by asking about a USB flashdisk, which I interpretted as meaning a USB "memory key" of some type.

But then you started talking about flash cards, so ... umm ... basically I have no idea if this post is even on topic.

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 ... 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.

Do you really want it bootable?

[zsazsa]

Watch out -- SD is slllllllllllllloooooooowwwwww. Other flash formats are faster, but they're still really not suitable for running an OS from.

SD doesn't hold as much as MMC!

[molo]

Given the choice between SD and MMC media, you should go with MMC. Why?

A 16mb SD card came with my Palm m500. On the back of the card:

Please note that while your new SD card is a 16MB card, only 14.6MB are available for your use, with the remaining 1.4MB in a security area on 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

Use CompactFlash!

[PurpleFloyd]

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.

Re:Use CompactFlash!

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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?

Puppy Linux...

[nickos]

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?

I might wait a bit longer &/or get this ...

[adzoox]

I have been looking at thumb drives & pen drives for quite some time now. For your solution, you'd be best advised to get a 9 in 1 memory reader (Only $15 at Computer Geeks) This reads SD/MMC/XD/Compact Flash/Memory Stick/Smartmedia - (some formats have more than one type)

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.

Some thoughts

[Jucius Maximus]

I just got my own USB dongle drive because my iBook has no floppy. Just to avoid confusion, I'll say this: As far as I'm concerned, USB Key Drives, Thumb Drives, Keychain drives, dongle drives are all the same things: Just a small usb dongle with flash memory hardwired into them.

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.