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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.'"
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.'"
Didn't you notice from the review how incredibly slow flash drives are for small random writes? And that's what matters for swap, as pages in memory are 4KiB. Fastest of the tested drives was getting 0.1MB/s at that block size. Of course in practice swap writing will not be completely random, so maybe the actual performance is not that much worse than a normal harddrive...
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.
IANAL but I really don't think whether you used an "audio" CD makes any difference whatsoever, since the two are functionally identical. The act says that the tax will be added and it says that you can make personal copies, it doesn't say "the consumer shall be required to put audio only on discs marked for the purpose". Besides, format-shifting to mp3 is legal, and downloading the mp3 without proper permission is a violation of copyright anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
---PCJ
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
So, how are they like floppies?
They can be read and written directly from applications (in the same way as a hard drive or network driver) on the majority of pcs without needing any additonal software or hardware and they are small enough to easilly carry arround.
That combination of features is IMO what has allowed USB sticks to replace floppies where everything else failed to do so.
The superfloppies (zip, LS120, HIFD etc) remained niche products because of reliability issues and the fact that none of them could never get the drives widespread enough (yeah you could cart arround the drive and a CD of drivers for the drive but that kinda reduced the portability). CD-RW got the hardware widely distributed but unfortunately burner manufacturers stopped shipping directcd and in doing so largely killed off "packet writing".
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The problem with SSD vs HDD is not the write times, the IOPs on a good SSD is great compared to HDD. The problem is that the SSD wears out with each write, and this happens much faster than with HHD.
Reliability, not speed, is the hurdle.
nLite is your friend. Slipstream drivers, service packs, hotfixes, plus configure/disable many of XP's annoying defaults
http://www.nliteos.com/
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.
> 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.
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.
And that, my friend, is the beauty and magic of complaining on slashdot.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.