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USB Flash Drive Life Varies Up To 10 Times

Posted by timothy on from the that's-worse-then-the-spread-for-people dept.

Lucas123 writes "Differences in the type of memory and I/O controllers used in USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo, according to a Computerworld story. While a slow USB drive may be fine for moving a few dozen megabytes of files around, when you get into larger data transfers, that's when bandwidth contrictions become noticeable. In 2009, controller manufacturers are expected to begin shipping drives with dual- and even four-channel controllers, which will increase speeds even for slower drives."

3 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Last time I do that.... by Statecraftsman · · Score: 0, Troll

    I finally RTFA and it tells me to pay more for stuff!

  2. Re:MARKETING! by bane2571 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Simple, thumb drives aren't for technical people, I'd assume anyone that cares about transferring data has a portable HDD that pushes 300+ GB. Thumb drives are for easy theft of office documents and quick trading of porn images.

  3. Re:Problem with english language, not FSF by Hal_Porter · · Score: 0, Troll

    FSF isn't trying to twist the word "free". It's just the english language which is broken and lacks a simple everyday adjective with proper unambiguous distinction between "freedom" and "costless". They're are just trying to make a distinction between two completely different concepts using a language which lacks the proper tools to make that easy. Dude, seriously, what the fuck.

    Do you seriously believe that the English language is broken and lacks the tools to explain the FSF's ideas? Or any ideas for that matter. Isn't it more likely that the person who said that just sucks at explaining the ideas and is arrogant enough to blame the language.

    I think the whole repurposing of the word free is completely barking mad. Orwellian in fact. Maybe the FSF should go the whole hog and invent a language, say GnuSpeak to make pronouncements in if English is broken.

    RMS could post gibberish on the net and his acolytes could then claim that if people would only take the time to learn GnuSpeak they would realise what a genius he was.

    Latin languages doesn't have this problem, and there's no "free vs. free" ambiguity. Thus nobody speaking those languages has the impression that FSF is playing with words.

    Besides, exFAT still costs money to the user, as Vista SP1's license explicitly requires that the user has bought a valid license for Vista, which almost never costs zero, except if the user got it through some channels as MSDNAA. Well so what. I don't have exFAT on my machine that came with Vista. I download SP1. I have exFAT. According to the non FSF definition of "free" exFAT is free. I didn't have to pay for it.
    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;