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Flash Drives Go To Work
feminazi writes "USB drive capacity is outpacing Moore's Law by doubling every year, evolving from tchotchkes to devices capable of addressing corporate needs ranging from mobile computing platforms to files stores with encryption and biometrics protection. SanDisk and M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers launched a thumb drive with an intelligent U3 chip that can store and launch applications. Lexar's premium JumpDrive Lightning thumb drive has the fastest data-transfer rates at 18MB/sec write and 24MB/sec read. And some are strong on the outside, too. SanDisk touts a drive built to withstand 2,000 lbs. of pressure. Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle over the ruggedized thumb drive. While the drive's body came away with a few scratches, there were no dents, and not a single lost file."
Sure you can drive a Beetle over it, but so you know the bandwidth of a Beetle full of thumbdrives on the highway?
When I first saw these at Comdex 2000, I thought "These things will replace all removable media someday."
Looks like they'll do even more.
It's a great feature that SanDisk has a flash drive that can be driven over. However, I can't think of the number of times I have forgotten those little buggers in my pockets when they've gone in the wash and the number of time they've come out and still worked perfectly normally. I have got to say, in a day and age when things break if you look at them wrong, it's great that we have invented the 21st century's response to the swiss army knife.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
Running the drive over with a car is at most going to be only 20-40 psi(pounds per square inche), the tire pressure. Maybe if the whole car was balanced on one wheel and then drove over it.
USB = UNIVERSAL Serial Bus
Point is, just about every remotely modern laptop and desktop in the world has USB ports, a redesign or different format without backwards compatability would defeat the purpose of it.
2,000 lbs. of pressure
2,000 lbs is not a pressure; there's no area. It's weight. This is basic high school physics...
Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle over the ruggedized thumb drive. While the drive's body came away with a few scratches, there were no dents, and not a single lost file."
A Neu VW beetle weighs about 3000lb. If the entire force applied against the road by one tire was applied to the device (for example, by putting a piece of thick metal on either side of the device and then running the car over the plate of metal), that's only 750LB. This is basic grade school math (3000/4.)
I'd guess your average thumb drive has perhaps 1-2 square inches of surface area. The amount of pressure between tire and road is exactly equal to the inflation pressure of the tire, which is often around 30-35 PSI (Pounds Per Square Inch.) So the thumb drive never had more than 60-70lb put on it...
Please help metamoderate.
This is from the 512MB model /dev/sdb1:
Timing cached reads: 2324 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1161.93 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 76 MB in 3.01 seconds = 25.26 MB/sec
Fast little thing
Ask for other benchmarks and I will run them.
On some drives, like the ones my college bookstore carries, you can't access the writable portion of the drive until after the U3 software is loaded into Windows. Hell, I couldn't even get past it using my Linux laptop.
And the U3 software fails on virtually every computer on campus, because the computers are locked down in such a way that one cannot install device drivers using a normal student account.
The real kicker? They're replacing all the PCs in the campus labs with ones without floppy drives. So even those poor kids with only a few hundred KB of data will have to use a flash drive, and us student assistants will have to support them.
Already, I've had to tell too many students that yes, they can access their data from home with that flash drive. No, they won't be able to use that flash drive here. Yes, I realize their assignment is due in twenty minutes. No, there's nothing I can do about it; I don't have any greater a degree of access than they do.
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If a unicycle tire is at 50 psi with 100 lbs on it then there has to be 2 square inches touching the road, assuming the tire is flexible. A rigid tire could have less area in contact, but tires are flexible.
If you still don't understand, try googling or take a look at how to weigh a car by measuring surface area here
Oh, and a 100 lb woman in stiletto heels can exert over 1000 psi if she balances on her heel. We're talking about weight per unit area. Even though it is counterintuitive, you will exert more force per unit area on your bike than a bigrig full of i-beams, assuming you have higher pressure tires.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Thats a great idea for a movie!
ThumbDrives On a Plane!
That's what I'm talking about!
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Moore's famous "law", previously a handy rough predictor for the maximum obtainable complexity of ICs (integrated circuits, e.g. CPUs) is often unappropriately applied to fields which it has nothing to do with, e.g. the maximum capacity of HDDs. Does it apply in this case?
Here is Anandtech's last year USB Flash Drive Roundup: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2549&p=3
It seems to be still relevant almost a year later. No faster models have come out from any of the major brands that I am aware of.
No word on how much compression was achieved by driving the Beetle over it? A rather inefficient method in any case.
BB had the 1 gig's on sale so I bought a few to add to my toolbox. I found reformatting didn't get rid of U3, then went to the sandisk website and downloaded the uninstaller. Must be hidden somewhere on the drive, but at least the uninstaller trashed U3 for good :)
Moore's law is often stated regarding the decreasing cost of a single transistor, or (equivalently) about the number of transistors per device of a given cost. Since flash RAM is constructed using a particular form of transistors (with an additional isolated gate that will hold a charge or lack thereof), Moore's law seems to (roughly) apply. In any case, flash is much closer to an ordinary IC than a hard drive.
We have a research group here that does JPEG 2000 compression research. As you might guess, this generates staggering amounts of data. They don't transfer it over the network to other places, they FedEx harddrives. Turn out, with the amount of bandwidth the campus has and the slice they can easily get, 1TB is about the crossover point where FedEx overnight becomes faster. They usually FedEx a box with like 2-4TB worth of external harddrives in it, and get a similar box in return.
Sounds kinda silly, but really works out better overall. It's cheaper too, than it would cost to get the university to buy more bandwidth and dedicate it specially to them.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE IF YOU ARE GOING TO KEEP ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT.
We purchased 3 of them for our IT staff in the local office. All 3 failed within 3 months of ordering, and 2 of the replacements failed after that (within a month of replacement). We had them switched out for some Cruzer Micro and Minis, and have been fine ever since (several months now).
My theory is the metal on the case. While strong, I think the metal in the case conducts static and shorts into the flash chips or USB controller inside. I don't even know if titanium conducts or not, and Sandisk denies there is a widespread issue with these drives, but go read the amazon.com forums on this product and you will be scared off.
It's a shame. They are a wonderful design, no caps to loose and the drive slides inside the case to protect the USB connector. But it's useless if you can't trust it. One of mine worked one second when I had it plugged into a laptop, then I dismounted it, walked 10 ft to my computer, plugged it in and it was DOA. I think it may have been the static from the carpet, I had it hanging around my neck. You're better off with a plastic one and just back it up periodically to protect against loss or damage.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
At work we're seeing a larger number of motherboards where the USB suddenly fails. It only seems to happen to those using drives or palm sync devices.
If the enterprise uses flash drives more, will we end up replacing more motherboards as well?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Yup, a truck full of tapes (or disks, it you have *good* packaging) is still the standard way of doing high volume data vaulting. If you need to move multiple TB per day (nothing special for a large datacenter), you don't want to pay for that amount of bandwidth unless you absolutely have to, i.e. you need online access.
That's why tapes keep falling off the back of a truck and get lost every now and then. Bummer if there's credit card records on those tapes. That's why hardware encryption is getting a lot of attention recently.
TFA mentions encryption is passing; are there any standard USB drives with encryption yet? How is the password transmitted to the drive? I sometimes have a bad feeling carrying company data and sources around all the time. I keep the USB stick attached to the company badge so I won't lose is easily, but still...
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