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16GB Flash USB Dongle
Derek Dongle writes "This is great — Toshiba plans to bring out a limited edition 16GB USB dongle. What would you do with 16GB in your pocket? Who knows? As the writer of this story says, "It may be one of the occasional cases of: who cares? It's a 16GB USB drive that fits in your pocket and weighs 12 grams!" I'm not quite sure I want to call it a dongle. At 8x2 cm it's not the smallest thing to attach to a keychain. But at 16 GB you could keep a good bit of your life there, provided you aren't working in audio or video. I keep a 1GB stick on my keychain, which is enough for almost anything.
It will be at least $400 I would say, since they mention at 64gig drive for $1600 in the article. It will possibly be more, since it is smaller and a "limited edition".
Not sure why it is "limited edition", since surely we are just going to see bigger and bigger USB drives, as we have in the past.
This comment sounds like someone who always talks about "how durable" these drives are withotu actually owning one.
I have has my 512 MB thumb drive go through the wash no less than 3 times. I have had it dropped, stepped on countless times. Never once have I lost data and it still wokrs fine to this day.
Flash drives **are durable**, much more so than any DVDR or CDR are. Lexar even makes a hardened case version that can be run over with a car.
oh come on use the real things.
Copies of xpkeygen.exe, antiwpa.exe, and other important tools to eliminate the crap that MSFT tries to shovel at you.
Durable- I have one of the early 128MB models that came out- use it all the time- still works like a charm after going through the wash- and going swimming with me.
(just make sure you let them dry before using them when they get wet)
Not really enough space- but I've never got around to getting a more modern bigger one yet.
Sure- the top comes off occasionally when I pull the drive out my pocket and it gets caught on a wocket. But despite my worry that after x-hundred uses the top wouldn't stay on- it does a fair job of staying where it is told. (unlike the wocket).
Flash drives are pretty durable- if they can survive sharing a pocket with a wocket- they can survive anything.
Kanguru has had a 16GB drive out for over 3 months. Why is this interesting new news? http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html
You already can install on os on you flash drive. SLAX would definitely be my favorite, since it has KDE, rather than one of the "light" window managers in Puppy, DSL, and the other small live distros use. I even found some directions so you can leave it as Fat.
You can have SLAX load to ram if you have about 512mb available. As for writing files, I believe that all writes are writen to RAM and when you shut down you are given the option of making writes permanent.
That's a limitation of the filesystem the drive is formatted with. If you're willing to sacrifice some cross-platform portability, you should be able to format the drive as NTFS, ext3 or some other filesystem that's not so limited.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The problem with disabling USB is that more and more machines (especially from the big OEMs) use USB for both keyboard and mouse (my home machine uses USB for mouse and PS2 for keyboard). So you cant completly disable USB.
Size is good and all but we really need speed. With the popularity of porable apps and U3 technology we're really going to need a push for speed. Recent speed comparison of some flash drives I use portable apps such as portable ethereal, firefox, thunderbird, portaputty and I love them but the larger apps or apps with large data such as thunderbird really lag even on USB 2.0 flash drives. Correct me if I'm wrong but the bottleneck is not the USB bus but the flash.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Although this one is one of the "better" ones I've come across.
Such double speak in only a few lines, it's great.
A dongle is a device that is plugged into a computer which allows protected software to run. A USB thumb/jump drive, portable storage device, yes. Dongle - no.
You wouldn't need to write zeros to the whole thing to format it unless you wanted to check for bad blocks. However, every write will reduce its lifespan so I wouldn't waste it with zeros in the first place. Some operating systems call is a quick format, but I just omit the -c from mkfs.
Cthulhu Saves.
Thats why i like my watch. Has a built in 512MB drive and is on my wrist so I don't have to worry about all the problems of a "keychain" drive. Won't get banged up in my pocket, won't drop it will taking something out of my pocket.
Largest one i have seen though is a 2GB one.
Speeds are definately a concern.
/sec max. 5mb /sec average which is quite acceptable.
I have found aida32 to be an excellent windows based software with which to test the speed of the drives.
My current drives of 512Mb -> 2Gb all perform around 9Mb
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