USB Thumb Drives as ... Fashion Statement?

The Fun Guy writes "The New York Times has discovered USB thumb drives: "In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches [DNA must be on file to read] to lend them a personal identity." Apparently, the most important thing about thumb drives is not that they are cheap, fast, durable, easy to use or hold a lot of data, but that wearing one around your neck identifies you as one of the techno-congniscenti, especially if you personalize it with stickers."

Comments

No DNA Sample Required

[romper]

C|Net is carrying the same NYT story here.

Re:No DNA Sample Required

[FortKnox]

I'd think someone cool enough to use a term "DNA Sample" for registration would be cool enough to know about bugmenot (they even have a firefox extension!).

Re:No DNA Sample Required

[maxume]

bugmenot is great, but lots of sites are running active campaigns against it. It is useless on the Washington Post. I think the NYT blocks them too.

Re:No DNA Sample Required

[drinkypoo]

I recently visited bugmenot and tried about 20 or 30 of their nyt logins before I gave up in disgust and created one myself. I did mark all the bad logins as bad, and I did add my login to the database, but either people are not marking them bad, or they are not being removed when they are marked bad. bugmenot is pretty useless, at least for nyt, though the first three times I used it the first login it gave me worked.

"Durable"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had 3 from different manufacturers fail in 2 months. Both were heavily used and on my keychain often being bounced around in my pockets.

Didn't see any physical damage, so don't know what happened to them.

Anyone have a reliable one?

Re:"Durable"?

[Lxy]

Which manufacturers?

I like the Sandisk cruzer mini. It's small, has a lanyard, and 3 multicolor caps. The only problem I've had with it is when I pulled it out while data was being written to it and I had to reformat it. If the light is blinking, don't pull it out! :-) If I could post a picture of mine, I would. It looks like it's been through a war, and it works flawlessly. Oh, and did I mention they're the cheapest ones out there?

Sony Microvaults are complete crap, and Sony finally stopped making them. Lexar Jump drives are rumored to be poorly made, but I have no personal knowledge. Simpletech Bonzais work well, but they have a really ugly shape and size. Our users don't seem to care for them, even though they are reliable.

As the drives are getting more popular, they're becoming cheaper. Hopefully the manufacturers don't sacrifice quality to compensate.

Re:"Durable"?

[dslbrian]

Lexar Jump drives are rumored to be poorly made, but I have no personal knowledge.

I've gone from a Lexar Jump drive to a Sandisk Micro (not mini). The Lexar was pretty poorly made, the case was plastic and the loop for clipping it on things was also plastic. After a few months of use the loop was starting to crack and I found it had corrupted data one day, so I upgraded to the micro. (once the flash starts to get corrupted I figured its time to get something else..)

The Sandisk Micro is nearly the ideal case and form factor. Its entirely enclosed in a metal can, with a large metal loop at the end for clipping to keychain. Surrounding that is a clear rubber plastic layer for absorbing impact. Bright (very bright) blue LED light on the end when its plugged in and transferring data. Very small (smaller than any other one I've seen) such that I keep it clipped on the keychain all the time. Cheap too - $36 for 256mb from newegg ...

USB drive Failures

[Kaduco]

Recently covered these things in a class. Apparently after a few thousand writes they fail rather magnificently. The drive has to keep track of where it's written, and try to write uniformly over the less-used sectors. Learning that made me a little more cautious about how often I use mine (I know it won't make a real difference, but still). Guess that and the speed difference compared to a hard disk (which is MUCH faster) means we won't see these revolutionizing large (GB) data storage nor replacing hard drives.

Karma already maxed, I'm bored -- blogsafe link!

[Buran]

Blogsafe version (get yer blogsafe NYT links at http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink -- why Slashdot doesn't know about this yet I don't know)

...and cost.

[EtherAlchemist]

1GB is the biggest I've seen and the best deal on that is at newegg. $84 is hard to beat for a 1GB stick.

Remarkable how much these have dropped in price, it wasn't very long ago that 1GB flash was up around 200-300 bucks! I remember thinking I got a deal when I bought a 64MB for $20 a year and a half ago.

Re:...and cost.

[masoncooper]

I got my PQI stick in last week and it's amazing! It's fast enough to compile off of and 1GB means it'll be a LONG time before you run out. The coolest part is that it come with a wallet insert so for the thickness of about 2.5 credit cards you can carry 2 sticks everywhere you go. Someone mentioned that Tiger Direct was sold out. I got mine from Surplus Computers, does anyone know why these cards have taken such a steep drop in price?

Re:What should they be called?

[Lxy]

I call them USB flash drives. It's universal enough that just about everyone knows what you're talking about. Jump drives, thumb drives, pen drives, etc are all TMs, and since there is no clear leader in the USB flash drive market you can't universalize it just yet.

iomega usb thumb drives SUCKS

[PhiberOptix]

i dont know (or care) about stilish thumb drives, but one advice >>

dont get near those crap iomega usb thumb drives. Our ti manager thought they looked cool, and bought about a dozen of them. 3 months later, all of them were broken and were replaced by cheaper and better ones made by kingston.

Re:Around the neck

[stratjakt]

It depends how the PC is put together.

Basically what happens is the +5 and ground get shorted.

So the PC can have electronics to detect the short and disable the USB port - more likely in an expensive machine, or a server.

Or, the PC can detect the short and power down, which calls for cheaper electronics.

Or, the PC can do nothing about it, the +5 rail will suck juice until the PSU shuts itself down, hopefully before your mobo melts.

My motherboard will shut down (supposedly safely) if the power rails fluctuate too far out of range.

Almost any PSU will shut down (usually safely) if you short the rails together. Try it! It's fun.

JOGR 1GB...

[Physics Dude]

This is the best thumb drive I've seen. It's waterproof, shockproof (encapsulated in superball material so it can take 1000G's of abuse). ;)

Brand: JOGR
Capacity: 1 GB
Interface: USB 2.0
Price: $105 shipped ;)

I love this thing!

Re:techno-congniscenti?

[joranbelar]

You're both half-right - it'd be congnoscenti (plural) ;)

iPods

[fsterman]

I am amazed no one has mentioned that 40gb portable hard disk- the iPod. Screw files, I move computer images to the far flung and scattered computers at my work. Many have only 56k modems, which makes it nuts to do every damn patch over. At some places I need to make a custom image on the spot, I give the CD's to the staff and use my iPod to do image computers while I'm there.

Really USB thumb drives are already old. Cheap? Yes, but only until HD prices come down enough. Not cheap when compared to 1 and 2 Gig ones! For an iPod it is $399/40= $9.9, or ten bucks a gig. $10/Gig vs $100/Gig now that's kicking Flash drives ass! And if it's style you want 4Gig iPod Mini is $250 is still $62/Gig.

A recommendation

[karniv0re]

While we're doing thumb drive reviews, I might offer my review:

I bought a 16MB Memory Bar for $20 a few years back. Since then, it's been through the wash twice (fully submerged), gets dropped often, kicked around, and still works. The only thing that's going to keep this thing from working is if I loose it (which, with my luck, is very likely).

Highly recommended.

Re:techno-congniscenti?

[ZooDog]

I believe it's cognoscenti.

Re:Any ideas on security

[Xibby]

I only keep a few important documents on my flash drive. Since I have to move between Windows and Linux (and occasionally Macs...) I have multiple binaries of GnuPG on the drive.

Ideally, you want some way to write directly into the encrypted file. I'm not aware of anything to do that myself...yet. Only started looking.

For now I just encrypt and decrypt a zip file (gpg -c --cipher-algo AES256 file.zip). The obvious flaw here is that yes...you can use an undelete program to retrieve the unencrypted zip file off the drive (I've successfully done so.)

My goal was to generally make the drive un interesting to someone who finds it. Unless they have some knowledge of how things work, they're either going to open up the text file with my contact info or wipe the drive clean because double clicking on these .gpg files doesn't do anything...

What I'd like to do is throw an encrypted file system image on the thing. That way only a previous version of the encrypted file system image could be recovered. Until I find something cross platform that doesn't require software to be installed on the host computer, that just isn't an option though. My advise is just don't put anything on it that you don't want someone else to see. Or get a piercing and attach your flash drive by a chain. Maybe you'll start an Office Punk trend...

Re:Why?

[ericdano]

Ha!

I've been through 3 USB Flash drives. Durable is not something I'd use in a sentence with Flash Drives.