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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.
This would be perfect for all those times when I've had to repair a computer and the OS has been completely fubared but I still need to try to repair or save settings and files.
As noted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle, while this *was* true, the meaning has evolved - I fought against calling PCMCIA card cables 'dongles' using your assertion above, but couldn't fight progress on this one.
> Vista will be able to boot off flash drives and, just possibly, U3 flash drives will turn PCs into thin clients.
I predict a return of the boot virus and you won't even know you're carrying it to every box, just because the last one didn't boot right. And btw, Vista can also walk your dog, make breakfast and do your homework - just like it used to be able to do WinFS and so many other wonderful things which later got pulled.
Once as an experiment, I turned on BOOTP on my linux server in office and loaded up a 14 Mb initrd into the tftpd, during the weekend. To my surprise, on monday half the office machines were booting into a linux command line and all the administrators were tearing their hair out.
Secondly, most offices I know are starting to disable their USB connectors and some of the better ones are disabling the USB data pins (ipods still charge, but no copying). 16 Gb is a lot of data that can be pulled out of a place, especially with something which is magnet free (most of these places have scanners for magnetic media).
But it is a limited edition drive right nowQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I keep wondering who these silly people are who piss on the parade, every time. I expect a healthy chunk of Slashdotters to say "so what!" The submitter is, at best, completely unexcited. I mean, even the author has the "I don't know what it's good for but yeeehaw."
16GB on a USB dongle/keychain is great! Finally, I can slap a few different movie choices, compressed, and a mess load of mp3s when I head over to visit friends for an evening or family for an afternoon, all without needing a notebook or similar device to hold it. It'd be great to show up for a night of fun and be able to have 10 different comedies movies on your keychain, so your buddies can have a little selection. How about showing up to your sisters house with a dozen Disney/Pixar flicks for the kids to watch... all without scratching a DVD? And, yes, it further pushes into the peripheral (no pun) territory of the iPod's benefits as multipurpose portable storage.
I hope more people release similar sized usb dongles. And large ones. It all helps drive down the price.
It would be nice to get someone to create a flash drive built for the purpose of an OS. It would have to be more urable than a normal flash drive because of the amount of data involved. Current drives simply don't last long enough under that kind of pressure.
When you're talking about 16GBs, you could almost do away with your normal hard drive and use web based drives for storage. Portable computers would be lighter. Perhaps you could even increase the speed of the drive with caching (perhaps it's already done...).
I'd like a flash drive I could put my OS on and not worry about it's data integrity.
When Kanguru has introduced a 64GB flash drive (measures 1.5 x 2.5 x 9.2 cm). Link to it here.
For me at least, the huge $2,799 USD price tag will keep it out of my pocket for at least a little while. But one thing's for sure: prices always come down. Wonder what this will go for this time next year.
....for flash storage in notebooks. I for one would LOVE a notebook with "only" 16 GB of storage...provided that 16 GB was flash. No spinning motors and platters means a more useful, portable device.
I backed up my files to my flash drive, and then left it in the USB port and proceeded to upgrade Solaris. It kept complaining that my primary boot drive was only 512M and only had 15M free. I thought something was fuxx0r3d with my partition table, until I saw what the mount point was... At least now I know my box can boot from USB, that may come in handy, given a sufficiently sad set of circumstances.
Just junk food for thought...
umm... 16GB usb dongle drive made by Toshiba. big deal.
A company called Kanguru has been making a 64GB USB dongle drive for quite a while now.
You can buy it from many places including Tiger Direct ( Kanguru 64GB Flash Max Drive