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Hi-speed USB2 Flash Drive Round-Up
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a USB
2.0 Flash drive review featuring 8 drives from different manufacturers. What's so interesting about the review is that not all Flash
drives are created equal. Some have very unique features while some are clearly
better than others. They also took a detailed look
inside one of the drives as well as put two
drives in a RAID-0 array (a la Mac OS X). Now that's cool!"
This is quite a big geekier if you ask me.
Striping floppies to get better speed and storage...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
The case has a vent in it, so water definitely passed through it.
Gotta love it. Remember this guy. He used USB floppies in pretty much the same manner. I actually emailed him because I was curious about portability(traveling kind). Apparently all the raid information is stored on the drives so the entire raid array could be plugged into another machine and would work with no problems.
NAND Flash is what's making this possible. It's denser and faster than NOR Flash.
If you haven't heard of MRAM, that's definitely another technology to be on the lookout for. According to IBM and Infineon Technologies, it's supposed to start shipping this year.
Basically, it has the density of DRAM, 15ns access time, and doesn't loses it's state even when powered down.
Google turns up some articles: here, here, and here.
Regarding the SanDisk Cruzer Mini, Ars Technica mentions:
Unfortunately, we were unable to ascertain the type and strength of encryption.
Apparently, even the product packaging neglects to mention it. Neither is it listed on SanDisk's website. It could be as simple as rot-13 or as complex as multiple cascading one-way secure pads with quantum elliptical entanglements. Do you dare probe further to figure out what it's doing? Certainly not; you could well violate the DMCA.
Now all we need is a small motherboard, lcd display + keyboard + network card, and we have a nice (cheap?) QUIET portable xterminal.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Well, for those that are interested in the 'bulk' data, you can pickup a 1GB SanDisk Cruzer Mini for only $162 after an instant rebate...
m as terid=1956584/search=1gb%20usb
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/
I've had a 256mb Fuji for 18 months now, and a 8mb DiskOnKey for 2 years before that (the Fuji is a re-branded DiskOnKey drive). The complaints from Ars Technica are only valid if you keep your flash drive on a lanyard. As I can't stand anything hanging off my neck (too much like a tie!), I keep mine clipped to my keyring. I've never had it come unclipped, nor have I lost the drive part (the clip is on the cover, not the drive itself). In fact, having the clip on the cover is very useful, as I can leave it connected to my keyring while the drive is in use.
I'm surprised the review didn't cover performance under GnuPG and PGP -- I keep my keyrings on it, as well as my Quicken backups. Plus tons of room left for mp3s to listen while at work. The SiSoft benchmarks are nice, but I'd like to know how slow/fast they are relative to an IDE drive.
Chip H.
Can you dual boot a bootable USB drive? Sounds like a fun way to waste a few hours....
Rob
I noticed that some of these flash drives have "write protect". However, I noticed that some manufacturers claim that Linux cannot use the write protect functionality:
" When you put the write-protect switch to "ON" position, you cannot write any file or data into the device. You still can view and read the files and data in the device. You can switch the "Write-Protect" switch even you do not disconnect the device. Due to Linux OS limitation, the write-protect switch will not work on-line."
Flash drive manual
But I see in status messages when people plug in the flash drives that it says "write protect is off".
Does anyone have experience with these products in Linux and whether write protect works with the flash drive connected?