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Flash Drive Roundup
Braedley writes "When [Ars] last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70--not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"
has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"
The OCZ AVB 16GB that I have PROVES that they are NOT an undifferentiated commodity: it shat itself when I simply plugged it into my car stereo, which DOES NOT WRITE TO THE STICK. Then I got an RMA'd replacement, which worked once, then I plugged it into my Lady's laptop (a centrino duo dell) and it shat itself again.
Do yourself a favor, skip large OCZ flashes, they are garbage. Also, OCZ tech support is fucking agony. Probably best to avoid OCZ entirely.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that will relegate them to such a commodity status.
They are close to the perfect method for distribution of free computer programs/art/etc. Who needs AOL discs anymore! We can have a generation of usb key users. Of course I get lots of them from vendors in all shapes and forms, some are actually useful (led flash light, key holder, etc)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I just ordered some equipment from Newegg and I got two flash drives for free. A 4GB one and an 8GB OCZ one. I'm probably gonna use one as a swap on my new i7 Core desktop.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Sounds like they have the same status as the floppy disc did 15 years ago.
Cruise TT
The phrase, "I'll just put it on my flash drive" is fairly ubiquitous these days and often people will be surprised or even shocked if you don't have one. With smaller ones like 1GB flash drives being given away at tech events this can hardly be surprising. With their large capacity, ease of use and ability to boot from USB they've definitely replaced floppy drives in the computing world. But it seems they're going a step further, as solid state drives continue to increase in both speed and size and continue to lower in cost it won't be long till they or a derivation there of replace standard harddrives. I see them eventually being able to vastly overtake even 15k scsi drives once the read write times are improved.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Yes, pretty much, except that I really would like for them to make *metalic* end clips for where you tie the little string or where you clip it onto your key chain that don't break! The vast majority of them have crappy plastic ends that always end up breaking.
I should also mention that I like the unadvertized feature (bonus!) that many of these USB sticks can now survive washing machine cycles, if you just give them a few hours to dry when they come out of your wet pant pockets.
I would also like to see manufacturers spend an extra 1/1000th of a pennny and simply write on the outside of the USB stick the read/write speeds of the internal memory; granted if it exceeds USB2 max theoretical read/write it's somewhat pointless, but hey.. USB3 is coming out right?
Lastly people, after you buy one, don't forget to format them with truecrypt, before you dump any files on them. I don't want to see my medical records or SIN number find its way to the unattended StarBucks coffee table.
Adeptus
Here is the forum thread where I am trying to get support
And this is the private message to which he refers:
The simple truth is that OCZ sold me a piece of junk and now wants to replace it with another piece of junk. I've been looking for other options but it looks like I'm just going to have to take another flash drive and hope it works better. Unfortunately, I BOUGHT the drive in the first place because it's waterproof, and I don't WANT a different drive. TOO BAD!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember buying a 256MB usb flash drive for $80. Now they seem to be a dime a dozen. I just bought 3 4GB drives for $15.00 from Wallyworld just last month.
TFA does not mention warranty -- it's a decisive factor for me when I buy anything. The computer industry has given generations of consumers deep scars for forgetting the axiom, "Caveat Emptor".
Kingston offers a "limited 5 year warranty". The OCZ Rally 2 series has a lifetime warranty. I use these for NAS storage and they are good performers.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I'm running this baby in eSATA mode as a system disk for my mediaserver (windows xp).
What I can say is that it is doing quite nicely. Sometimes I do get application lag (writes to small files, perhaps?) but overall performance is quite good.
I've had to reboot this machine once due to strange behaviour but since then it's been running non-stop. I think actual uptime is more than a month at this point. Perhaps several, even.
If they could get random writes up to par I'd really think about putting one of these in my work machine. Geek factor, you understand ;).
...that's the word you're looking for. They've become ubiquitous. Like cell phones and computers. Unfortunately, when a product becomes ubiquitos and many, many companies start making it, you're bound to run into a wide range of quality--both good and bad. I'm sure no one here disagrees that there are many more crappy, unreliable cell phones and computers on the market today than 10 years ago.
To say flash drives have become "cheap plastic tsotschke" is accurate now about 90% of the time. I try to avoid "house brands" of any electronics, though. These usually make up the 90% of cheap, goldfish-lifespanned crap being pushed out to the consumers.
Personally, my favorite flash drives are the plastic PNY ones with the rough, matte finish. It is one of the few drives I can attach to a keychain and not have it either destroyed or transformed into a scratched-up mess within a day. The rubberized X-Porter flash drives are nice too and can be bought at fairly reasonable prices considering their speed and quality.
At least we know this, once a product gets to this stage of its life-cycle, you know it's become an important part of society and the original inventors should be proud of themselves for producing such an innovative (at the time) idea. Thanks, "law of diminishing marginal utility"! We love you!
with the corporate logo on them, most of which end up in the trash.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Rather than maintain my regular pattern of buying and losing ever-larger USB drives, I've opted instead to pay $5 to a web host with FTP access. I get 120GB of storage, can assign a domain name or subdomain to any directory if I want to label some specific content, or I can set up something fancy like a PHP/SQL CMS or wiki if I want to keep things organized. This content is available to me anywhere with internet access.
I do keep a small USB drive in my pocket if I'm doing an important presentation and don't want to take a chance on shoddy web access. That's the only time I ever rely on a USB drive, though. I'm simply too clumsy to trust myself with gigs of data in my pocket. The cheaper storage gets, the more valuable the data in my pocket become!
Frosted Mini Wheats -- collect nine (!) proof of purchases and get a Star Trek flash drive.
No joke. 1 GB, pre-loaded with Trek content, recommended for ages 8 and up.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
They've certainly become more common and cheaper, but still not common enough. I guess there will always be loads of people to stupid to be bothered to care, but its annoying to hear people asking about "UBS" sticks at the Walmart I work at, or a college student coming in asking where the CD-RW's are because his idiot "computer science" professor insists on assignments being turned in via CD...
Basically, until its as common as asking where the ketchup or milk aisle is, its still not common enough...
Rather than maintain my regular pattern of buying and losing ever-larger USB drives, I've opted instead to pay $5 to a web host with FTP access.
And $60 per month to a 3G ISP so that you can access the FTP host from your laptop, right? I carry a USB drive so that I can use my laptop on the bus without having to pay for tetherable 3G service.
Well I agree that USB keys have become a use once and lose piece of hardware there are still USB keys out there to hold there own.
It really just depends what you need. If all you need is a plastic key around your neck for some high school / college word documents then fork out 10 and get your self a 2GB. How ever on the other hand if you really need either performance or security then you can satisfy that to, just not for $10.
If you look at keys like the "Iron Key" you get a ton of security but at a much high cost per Gig. The average cost for the Iron Keys run:
$69 - $139 for a single Gig and that's the basic level.
On the other hand if your looking for performance you can still spend a good amount on just being able to run faster then those around you, the average cost of a performance stick:
$38 - $270 ( for a 64 GB)
so It really just breaks down to what you need, well I can agree that the average key is use once and lose kind of situation, you can still get good USB keys worth there cost.
Thanks
Docmur
I did not see the LaCie iamaKey USB flash drive in the review, but I noticed on a Lifehacker post yesterday and thought it would be a perfect USB drive:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11225
I constantly have problems with flash drives breaking off my keychain. This would solve that issue and looks very durable. Probably will buy it today.
10 years ago, I could give someone a file on a floppy disk and not worry about getting the disk back. I had an essentially unlimited supply of blank disks, you could get a stack of 10 for £1. Nowadays, I do have to worry about getting my USB stick back, as I only have three of them. I suspect that USB memory sticks will never really get to the same point that 3.5" floppy disks got to in that respect. The market value of, say, an 8MB memory stick might be similarly negligible, but no-one's making them.
Want to go to Tsotchkie's? Get some coffee?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
And that's what matters for swap, as pages in memory are 4KiB.
Memory pages on i386 were 4 KiB. In modern x86 CPUs, they're often 4 MiB, which fits a lot better with the 128 KiB to 1 MiB erase blocks of high-capacity flash memory if your operating system supports 4 MiB page mode. But then I'd recommend adding RAM over swapping to flash because it takes a lot more writes for RAM to wear out. If you do go the flash swap route, such as if you're using a subnotebook PC with an SSD, tune your operating system's memory manager to swap less often. (For example, in Linux, set swappiness to 10 percent on machines with slower writes than reads.)
Why won't anyone manufacture one with a white matte finish? That way they could be written on.
When will we see memory stick models with USB on one end and eSATA on the other? I'm sure there must be some demand from professionals for 16MB+ with such features. When you start moving around more than 1-2 Gb the slowness of USB gets to be a pain. And a 2.5" SSD is not as easy to keep on your key chain. (interesting to note that some SSds have both USB and SATA)
Or will USB 3 kill this idea?
Do we get a nice compare and contrast of the rootkits and malware included on these drives?
Nobody wants to hear you cry about your broken flash drive, alright? This is not the place for that, hence, "Off-topic".
The question is whether flash drives are a commodity item. The answer is no, there is a vast difference between various flash drives and it is still necessary to do research before purchasing one if you don't want to get boned. My anecdote supports this assertion, and so it is clearly on-topic. The only comments I've posted or intend to post in this thread which are not on-topic are this one and its parent. Admittedly, that is 50% of them, but since the Slashdot management is not interested in hearing about abuses of their ill-conceived moderation system (the invitation to email complaints about same was removed from the FAQ long ago) the only recourse is to post a comment.
So far this has worked pretty well for me; the majority of the time, someone comes along and "corrects" their moderation by modding the comment back up into reality and letting natural forces take over. I have attracted mod trolls repeatedly, such activity is trivial to identify when you're on slashdot for long periods of time because the trolls are stupid and lazy and tend to just go look for your four or five weakest comments and dump on you.
The AVB flash drives OCZ is selling are defective by design, they can be written to by reading them, or something. MANY people have gotten bad replacements for their bad drives. They are simply NOT compliant devices! This information is germane to the discussion about whether flash drives have been commoditized! If the situation were any clearer my comment would be invisible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So if we're agreed they're super-popular now, can we also agree on a name? USB stick, USB drive, pen drive, thumb drive. Just pick one! Where the hell did pen drive and thumb drive come from anyway?
It's a Unix system - I know this.
I'm sorry drinkypoo, but you actually are off topic here. You are going on a personal rant about OCZ. The topic is how flash media has become cheap and undifferentiated. Which is true. One flash stick is essentially the same as the other. You can usually swap out the flash memory in a jump drive and put it in another one. The only difference really is the same difference with any other commodity (including other undifferentiated ones) and that is a difference in manufacturing quality.
The "speed differences" are largely imaginary as the USB connection bottlenecks access times anyways. Things like customer support and warranties are factors for buying a specific brand of thumb drive but aren't qualities that differentiate the actual product as the products themselves are largely the same.
I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience with OCZ but complaining about Slashdot moderators isn't going to do any good anyways. Chances are by this afternoon you'll be +5 Insightful once someone who has also had a bad experience with OCZ gets in here. Of course given most people seem to have good experiences with OCZ its possible that you'll be a bit lower than +5 by the end of day.
I am waiting for 64Gb and 128Gb sticks. 256Gb would be nice to.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I got two Sony Micro Vault flash drives a year ago, like $20 for 2GB and $40 for 4GB. They are USB keys, but don't have the metallic anchor around them, making them about the same thickness as an SD card. I keep them in my wallet where I would normally keep my ID (relocated to CC pocket) and therefore have them accessible at all times. The 2GB key I keep encrypted (dmcrypt/LUKS) and that contains basically all my personal information. The 4GB key has anything and everything and constantly break it out to give or get data from people. I now can't live without them, and people are impressed by how nerdy I am that I have such small USB keys on me all the time.
I tried some similar Kingston USB keys (also tiny, with keychain hole) but both stopped working--completely, hopelessly dead--after 1 month.
The fact that we can store 16e9 bytes on a disk the size of our thumbnail for a price that is accessible to the average person, is evidence enough that we've reached "the future".
I bought an ADATA 16 gb flash drive when they first came out, and it worked great. It wasn't a "double wide", but was pretty thick and long. The computers I work on require small width due to some of their USB ports and I don't want to have to carry around a 4" usb jumper cable.
When my cat hid it, I bought another which turned out to be defective and I never was able to get a replacement. (at the time they cost over $130)
I bought a lexar firefly 8 and used that until they came out with a 16, which I now have.
The firefly is thin, not wide, short, has an easy to see activity light, and the lanyard attaches to the CAP, meaning it's not necessary to untangle yourself from it to plug it in. (and it leaves the noisy cap swinging around banging into things to remind you that you are about to forget your flash drive in the back of the machine you're walking away from) It's the only flash drive that I know of that has the lanyard attachment on the cap which is a great feature.
My only complaint is I wish it had a write lock switch. I don't have to work on viris-ridden windows boxes, but if I did, that would unfortunately be a requirement.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
True. But for those who still have machines running '98, there is a little known generic mass storage driver for '98 that allows use of newer drives that do not come with '98 support.
I have a tower still running 98SE that I installed this driver onto. It'll take any flash drive I shove into it, that whore :D.
---PCJ
Read my whole post before replying, please.
You admitted that sneakernet is useful for "doing an important presentation". But often, I have "shoddy web access" or none at all even when I'm making something and not presenting it. I might be waiting for my food in a restaurant that charges more than I'm willing to pay for Wi-Fi access, or I might be bored at someone's birthday party and waiting for a ride home. And I agree that a USB drive shouldn't hold the only copy of a work, but neither should a remote server.
64Gb = 8GB
One day I said to my 16-year-old daughter, "Hey, cute bracelet" and she says, "It's my flash drive."
I remember being amazed and a bit amused when you could get a Swiss Army knife with a USB drive. That was cool. But it's hard, and kind of interesting in weird sort of way, to see tech relegated to the fashion accessory of a teen girl.
Their list has three 16GB, three 4GB, one 2GB and one 1GB flash drives. How is that "mostly 4GB and 8GB"?
And the prices go from $10 to $56, how is that "from $9 to $30"? There's three drives over $30 listed, not to mention that only morons view $9.99 as being equal to $9 instead of $10.
O2 (phone company) will provide 500MB of data transfer that expires after 24 hours for £2. It's expensive, but there's no contract and no sign-up fee, so it could be OK if I only use it a couple of times a month.
Does any provider offer a similar prepaid data plan in the midwestern United States?
This is basic feature for the true geek.
;) This ain't rocket science. You want to waterproof something little, just put it in a condom and tie the end in a knot. Whether this is cost-effective or not depends on the price difference between your current USB drive and the fancy waterproof one, and the price of condoms over the expected use period (or how good you are at untying those knots).
ON DELETE CASCADE
You can get something similar for $0/month if 2GB is enough for you, and it has a really nifty auto-sync utility.
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTYwNjQzNzk
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
The "speed differences" are largely imaginary as the USB connection bottlenecks access times anyways.
Hardly. Access times might be terrible either way, but there's a significant (order of magnitude) difference in throughput between different flash drives. Not a big deal when all you're copying is 2 MB PPTs, but a potential deal breaker if you occasionally want to use it for 700 MB, uh, media files.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Commodity does not mean "perfect" and your anecdote does not actually tell us whether OCZ is bad or whether you got an unlucky batch. Without a statistical analysis, we don't know if there's any validity to your rants as far as predicting how future items will behave.
For most of us, fruits and vegetables are commodity items at the grocery, but you can still end up with a rotten or wormy item by chance. Some people might blame Dole (a supplier), or a grocery chain, or the local stock boy's handling, or the consumer's shopping skills/luck, or the consumer's handling of the fruit post-purchase. None of these actually make it less a commodity, and essentially all of them apply to your case as well.
> The "speed differences" are largely imaginary
Uh, RTFA. Or go do some testing, or troll elsewhere.
The write speeds certainly are significantly different.
There's the crap 4-6MB/sec range. And there's the 12MB-20+MB range.
They certainly are not the same. The sandisk cruzer contour has a far faster write speed than the sandisk cruzer mini (which was tested in the article), but it's _wide_, so it blocks adjacent USB ports to the side. Some laptops only have two USB ports side-by-side (not top-bottom), so this can be quite annoying.
After a few years, everything in tech goes this way. Until somebody invents the "next big thing".
Lurking in the desert
blue ray
I do truly miss it from the days I had my easy disk 64MB thumb drive. I don't understand why vendors stopped putting the switch on them. I guess they could break over time or been having issues with them getting stuck in a position in the past, but I didn't personally have problems with my easy disk read only switch.
They could at least put them on external hard drives since that would be useful when hooking up a drive to a known virus/malware infested machine to run cleaning/diagnostics software off of and won't have to worry about the drive becoming infested as well.
This space is not for rent.
The 3.5-inch floppy disk of yore had a write protect tab. The typical flash drive of 2009 has none. This makes it hard for field reps and service people to avoid infecting their drives when working with customer computers!
A search via Google turned up the following recommendations for an eight-gig drive:
Kanguru FlashBlu II, model ALK-8G;
Imation "Swivel Flash Drive," model number 26654.
I ended up with the FlashBlu II; OS X 10.4 "Tiger" recognizes its write protection; I haven't tried Windows or Linux yet.
It is aluminum. Red. A nice thumb drive.
It is a little large, but all in all OK.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Sandisk Micro drives have a feature which websites often discuss but absolutely no one in the open-source world has actually made use of, or tried to figure out:
The fact that the flash drive, when inserted fresh out-of-the-box or after being formatted with Sandisk U3 tools, appears as *two* separate drives: a read-only CD (around 20MBytes I think), and the rest being a standard R/W flash drive (usually FAT formatted).
"Who cares? Get that CD/U3 crap out of here" is the first response, until you take the time to point out to someone the beauty of it. Think about it: a flash drive that's been formatted in such a way where there are literally multiple CDs appearing to the BIOS or bootloader, so that you can have a flash drive that has a FreeBSD disc1 CD on it, a Ubuntu Linux CD image on it, a Windows CD on it, etc... Now think about how useful that would be in a multi-OS co-location environment.
I spent 3-4 weeks trying to accomplish what Sandisk appears to be doing out-of-the-box, and I can't for the life of me figure out how they're getting the USB flash drive to actually appear as two separate devices. There must be some kind of USB CD emulation layer in the microcode on the drive itself which formatting (with the Sandisk U3 tool) tickles.
If you format the flash drive using the famous HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (e.g. make your USB flash drive bootable), you lose this capability, and end up with a flash drive that appears as a USB hard disk. Good luck booting multiple OSes for installation that way, without pulling your hair out or horrible hackery involving Fart, err, I mean Bart's boot tools and a bunch of other crap that assumes you're making a single CD.
Anyone know how Sandisk is doing this, and if so, why isn't there software out there which can let you "partition your flash drive" into multiple CDs using ISO files?
They have, at least in Cambridge. The local computer superstore has USB sticks, Sd and Micro SD cards in bins at the checkouts,$5-15 depending on size. Granted, they're store brand, but I use these as the other poster used floppies, without breaking the bank.
I'm guessing no, or they wouldn't have written an entire article about it.
I beg to differ.
Did you notice that most manufacturers only advertise read speeds nowadays?
With the wholesale move from SLC to MLC, write speeds dropped (as well as reliability).
I still believe that my Memorex M-Flyer is the fastest flash drive out there. Sure it's only 2gb (there were hopes of a 4gb for a while, but it got canned for some reason), but it's faster than any other flash drive I've ever used by leaps and bounds. A quick comparison with a Kingston drive and a ~600mb ISO shows the transfer to the kingston at a little over 2 minutes, where the M-Flyer was under a minute. By the looks of their website (http://www.memorex.com/products/product_details.php?FID=217&PID=1171) they are still offering the 2GB M-Flyer.
Does anyone know if anyone is still making such a combo? I've seem some that only have a 512MB flash drive a few years ago. Something like this would be very handy for fixing people's desktops at home; just pop it in, installs itself with drivers stored in the flash memory, and I have all of my diagnostic tools at the ready.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Commonly used CD ISOs: Linux Live OS, OPH, Photorec, Memtest, DBAN, Acronis Recovery, DOS boot Disk, pre-Vista MS OS's... That's alot of flash drives.
Common used util's and drivers come in handy on systems with short-bus syndrome(corrupt, legacy 1.0, or no drivers installed). Flash drives have also been known to corrupt/fail with no warning or apparent cause.
ISO creation of fresh OS loads(sans Vista), for fast & easy recovery... one copy on storage drive, one "working" copy gathering dust on the cd spindle.
I carry about a dozen disks daily, along with 2 flash drives and 2.5" SATA drive/cables.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Anybody here ever tried using TrueCrypt on a Flash drive for ferrying sensitive data between two places? Is it fairly reliable?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Do not give LaCie your money.
For years they have made a two disk external drive called Big Disk. This device uses a proprietary RAID 0 configuration. With a single drive external, if there is a problem, you can pull the drive and get a decent chance of recovering your data. If LaCie's Big Disk device fails in any way, your data is gone. LaCie will not help you. They won't even tell you what the offset or stripe size of the RAID is. Buy another device, and try putting the drives in that is their only advice. Clean room recovery is your only option, and that service for a RAID is quite expensive.
Not only do they continue to sell this device, they *advertise it for backup purposes*!
Here is their current ad:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11138
Some excerpts:
* Sturdy aluminum heat sink design for high reliability
* Ideal for large volume backups or creative pro use
* Genie and Intego Backup Manager Pro incl.
* Time Machine Compatible
Selling that device to people for backup use is unconscionable. Don't give LaCie your money.
We're going to hit a point really soon when the main difference between flash drives will be what OS they use to protect your data and what other functions are on the same chip.
As in, a flash drive that's not really a flash drive, it's a small computer that emulates a drive when plugged in to another computer. With wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, etc.
You'll pay extra for a drive that's smart enough to protect/hide important data from malware on any computer you plug it into, back up data to a remote server when wireless is available, phone home if lost or stolen, and tag files with location metadata as they are created.
And of course this already exists, as an SD card for cameras: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ACXHXE/ Welcome to the future!
It would be alot cooler to carry one big flash drive with a boot loader and many partitions containing the bootable images. Well, your afraid of the flash getting corrupted, carry two.
:)
Not that I do that, I tried but failed miserably at doing so. Does anyone know of an easy way of accomplishing this? Something as simple as this shouldn't be so hard to do
My god....do you live on Slashdot?
I read Slashdot infrequently, but virtually every story I open, there you are. I of course notice you given that you long ago marked me as a foe (I believe it was because you were copulating with a blu-ray player and I questioned your boy->electronics love)
USB Flashdrives are inexpensive, useful, stable, and work on most computers.
I have a container with 10 or so flashdrives of various sizes from 1 gig to 16 gig.
I do a lot of computer work, so I end up installing lots of software. I use a 16gig flashdrive to store the installers of software that I install often. The reason that I use a flashdrive instead of a DVD or portable HD is because a flashdrive is smaller than both, is not effected if I drop it, and most of those apps are updated regularly, so it is a pain to have to re-burn the whole disk just for 1 or 2 updates.
It is also a handy way to quickly transfer files between computers.
Also many DVD players have USB ports for displaying pictures, playing music or videos.
They also make nice gifts. I have made digital greeting cards and put them onto a flashdrive.
I have even made a digital Business card, but my name on the outside, and handed them out as Business Cards.
There are soo many uses for those little devices.
However for businesses to use them, that could be a major security risk.
from TFA:
Best Drives for fastest read/write speeds: The award here goes to both the OCZ Throttle and the Patriot Xporter XT. Both have very fast read and write speeds in USB2 mode. The OCZ Throttle also has a ridiculously fast eSATA mode. The Patriot Xporter XT has a Lifetime warranty (compared to the Throttle's 2-year warranty).
Amazon has a good deal after rebate and free shipping on the Patriot:
Patriot Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drive - 16GB (PEF16GUSB) $33 after rebate (buy.com $45, newegg $47)
Patriot PEF32GUSB Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drives (Black) $58 after rebate (buy.com $86, newegg $80)
"has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity... that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"
Yes. We had them when I did some part-time work as a bookstore cashier not long ago, and I see them at plenty of other places as well.
I remember being amazed and a bit amused when you could get a Swiss Army knife with a USB drive.
Can't use it with your laptop in an airplane, though.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't understand why vendors stopped putting the switch on them. I guess they could break over time or been having issues with them getting stuck in a position ...
They should use a hall sensor on the board and a magnet in the slider.
Or include the magnet in a double-cap connector cover set up so you have to leave the magnet ring on the drive to write it.
Magnetize the material in the ring as a Halbach array so it doesn't degauss any floppies if the key happens to be tossed in a container with them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I find it much more useful to have a USB adapter for SD cards. The adapter costs just a dollar, looks like a USB stick, same size, same speed, and you always have a spare memory card handy for your camera, phone or netbook. I've also found that to download stuff from, say, a camera, it's much faster to take out the SD card and connect it with a USB adapter, than to plug a USB cable into the camera.
It used to be possible to to go to a user's comment page to find out if they had thousands of posts. It gave me a better idea if someone was talking just to hear themselves speak. I think it's not possible to check that anymore.
The question is whether flash drives are a commodity item. The answer is no, there is a vast difference between various flash drives and it is still necessary to do research before purchasing one if you don't want to get boned.
And there are vast differences in the quality of vegetables. Does that mean that vegetables aren't a commodity? Of course not. I don't think you understand what the word means.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I don't know any person who still uses USB flash drives. Everyone I know, including I, uses SD or SDHC memory cards. These are readable on all devices (mobile phone, PDA, e-ink e-reader, netbook, laptop; oh and I don't own a PC!). USB drives can only be used with computers, not with e-readers or PDAs, so what's the use of them?
Requirements
To receive your Kellogg's(tm) Flash Drive Wristband, send:
Like floppies, we expect to retrieve our data now and next month. It happens so effortlessly and so reliably that we forget they can go bad. I along with many others, judging by the number of negative reviews, made the mistake of purchasing a Centron DataStickPro. Great design, neat metal case - totally unreliable. Called and emailed the company and when they actually responded, all they wanted, beside a lot of my time was the receipt. They claim to have a life time warranty, all I needed was the receipt. How many of you keep receipts for commodities like USB flash memory? I guess my point is to remember that these things do fail, like my judgment in buying DataStick.