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Best USB Flash Storage?

Posted by Cliff on from the portable-bootable-and- >3-meg-capacity dept.

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?"

6 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. USB Booting by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Other alternatives by tchuladdiass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. SD doesn't hold as much as MMC! by molo · · Score: 4, Informative
    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
    --
    Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
  4. Use CompactFlash! by PurpleFloyd · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Use CompactFlash! by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

  5. Puppy Linux... by nickos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?