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A Look at Excessive Portable Storage

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

9 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by palegray.net · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sure they do. You've got to strike the flash drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will able to write to it again.

  2. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do you mean USB sticks with little write-protect tabs like floppies? They do exist, you know - I have one somewhere. Admittedly it's a bit old and thus only 128MB, but the functionality is there nonetheless.

    A quick bit of Googling reveals that PQI still makes them in more useful capacities, and that they retain the write-protect tab. They're even still the same colour!

  3. Flash Memory Software Requirements by LowlyWorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think software requirements are keeping up with the newer hardware. True, I am writing this from FireFox installed on my flash drive but there is often very little consideration by many software developers for the needs of the portable software market. So much of it expects data on c: or writes to the registry. Since flash memory quality benchmarks are based on number of read/writes before failure it will be interesting to see how the newer USB hardware will stand up particularly with applications such as browsers and email that do extensive read/write operations.

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  4. "Excessive" Storage? by blcamp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's no such thing.

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    The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
    1. Re:"Excessive" Storage? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, "hours of uncompressed 1080p video" really is the most important storage metric now, and there are no products which provide enough of that for any conceivable scenario.

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  5. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You're right. Ok, to get write-protection, you've got to strike any user attempting to write to your drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will want to write to it again.

  6. Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday! by TwistedSymmetry · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's also an excellent form of one-way encryption.

  7. Now that's excessive! by dazedNconfuzed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.

    A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes.
    The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
    Now THAT'S bandwidth!

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  8. Re:wither plain text? by Applekid · · Score: 4, Funny

    So they could not store documents in plain text?

    You haven't lived until a user emails you a Word document with an embedded screen capture of a pdf viewer viewing a document that once existed as a Word document.

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    More Twoson than Cupertino