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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.
640K should be enough for anyone!
Let's face it, most "keychain" drives are flimsy affairs made of plastic, with tops that pop off easily--hardly the kind of thing you want to carry around every day in your pocket (especially if you're active). I wouldn't every want to drop these things, much less think of them going through the wash or getting banged around by my keys.
How about we see some more durable drives in larger sizes? Hell, I'd be willing to pay a premium for something I could rely on to take a beating.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just think how frustrated you get when you lose your keys at the moment...now imagine 16gb going missing with them!
Is that a Flash Drive in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me.
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.
Probably sit on it and break it. 8 cm long? Not short enough to prevent bending it should I sit on something that could act as a lever... like the edge of a subway seat.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Please, for the children, use TrueCrypt.
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.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 !
Wincopy
I agree why would I want to buy something that only stores 16 gigs for over a $150? Besides what would I store on it, Music? No, I can store more than 16 gigs on my MP3 player. If I need a big portable storage for data I will spend the money on an external USB drive. The 16 gigs is to much for a flash drive right now. It won't be cheap and your better off going with an external USB drive.
It seems to be overkill for anything I normally would use a flash drive for and to small to carry music on. It's an odd duck.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
"But at 16gb 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."
Two years ago it would have been:
But at 1GB you could keep a good bit of your life there, provided you aren't working in audio or video. I keep a 64MB stick on my keychain which is enough for almost anything.
Four years ago it would have been:
But at 64MB you could keep a good bit of your life there, provided you aren't working in audio or video. The convenience would make this a useful investment and allow us to throw the good old floppy away for good.
In 2010 it'll be:
But at 512GB you could keep a good bit of your life there. I keep a 32GB stick on my keychain which is enough for almost anything.
> 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.
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So, it's a *limited edition*? :)
Considering "640K shoudl be enough for everyone", we'll be carrying 32GB flashier soon, and the 16GB limited edition won't be anything special
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.
This would be a great replacement for the 12 inch dongle that's in my pocket currently... er, I mean 12 GB dongle.
What would you do with 16GB in your pocket?
Besides carrying my files in it, I plug in my headphones and listen to music while I'm working out.
When will they learn that this is not what we want. We want things that work, and work for a long time. I am sick of buying things that break after a few years. My grandmother has a vacumn cleaner that has worked for over 20 years. I honestly have yet to find a vacumn cleaner these days that work beyond a few years. I don't care about bigger and better, I care about smarter and tougher. Unless documents become over 5 megabytes a file, I will not spend my money on this. I will spend that same money and a few extra bucks to get a LaCie external hard drive.
Music, my drug; dance, my ecstasy.
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 can't help myself... with a strong rubber boot that fits snuggly around it, especially if you're active, pay a premium for something I could rely on to take a beating
That's what she said!!!
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
Kanguru has had a 16GB drive out for over 3 months. Why is this interesting new news? http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html
Most folks that I know use usb flash drives for backup and sneaker-net transfer. I wonder what the tranfer rate will be on this. Filling a 1G drive right now takes a fair while. If the transfer rates don't go up, having all that extra space doesn't really help you in a practical -I need to get this copy done and catch the bus in 10 minutes- kind of way.
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...
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.
"But at 16 GB you could keep a good bit of your life there,"
Yea, if you're an empty shell of a human being.
...rather it's..umm...I got nothing.
-- Boycott Shell
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!
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