USB FlashDrives The New PC?

olddotter writes "Yahoo has an article about how large capacity USB drives might be redefining the concept of the personal computer. The article is windows specific, but think knopix on a flash drive." From the article: "When you check into an average hotel room and find -- alongside the alarm clock, hair dryer and DVD player that once were bring-your-own items but now are as standard as the furniture -- a cheap PC for guests to plug into, as our truly personal computing environment travels with us."

Comments

Windows?

[Libor Vanek]

Now only if Windows can correctly boot on completely different box... Author probably never tried to take his Windows XP disk and boot in different box with different mainboard, video and network card...

vmware with no HD image perhaps?

[tepples]

Then how do you know it's not a virtual machine that's emulating a diskless PC?

Re:Flash drives don't last forever

[v1]

There are "spare" cells in flash drives just the same as there are "spare" blocks on hard drives. There are usually two controller chips in a USB drive (plus the flash chips) - they include the memory controller and a usb (or firewire if you happen to have one) bridge. The memory controller manages the memory and remaps cells that go bad, transparent to the usb/fw bridge. Anyone with a flash drive probably has some bad cells in it, just like hard drives 10 years ago that came with a label printed on the top listing all the bad blocks the new drive shipped with.

Parent talks about "wear balancing" - interesting concept though I have not heard of it used on flash drives before... would be a nice idea but not too fun to implement.

I use my flash drive several times a day at least, it's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. Perfect for hauling around all the maintenance, repair, and update software that I use daily. I don't know why people buy those giant drives that don't fit well in a pocket and block adjacent USB ports. SanDisk also has a lifetime guarantee on their drives, so if mine ever does use up all its spares, I'll just trade it for a new one. Lacks a write protect switch though, which would kinda be nice.

Also a less known factoid about USB drives... the fast ones - USB 2.0 "High Speed" (not to be confused with the "Full Speed" snails) only work in powered USB hubs. Can't plug them into the keyboard ports. I wish they'd fix that. I'm tired of having to crawl behind a computer to jack into one of the powered ports. Thankfully most manufacturers are placing a powered usb port on the front of their machines nowadays. (sometimes two)

Would be nice too if Apple would fix OS X so it didn't reset all the #@*& USB buses 1.5 seconds into boot, so we could boot X off our flash drives.

the NeXT big thing...

[ross_winn]

This is, for all intents and purposes, what NeXT tried to do in the late 80s. The optical drive they used was ruinously expensive. The software was limited. Now, twenty years later, theidea is coming into its own. Devices like the USB key, the microdrive, and the Palm LifeDrive are actually spacious enough to make all of this work. Twenty years ago Jobs said you should be able to walk up to any personal computer and make it your own. Ten years ago Ellison said that you could access anything from anywhere. In five to ten years these visionary things may just really happen. Funny how the world works, isn't it...