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?"

Comments

Abuse of moderation

[drinkypoo]

Here is the forum thread where I am trying to get support

And this is the private message to which he refers:

Hey,

At this point the only thing we can really do is RMA the drive again. If you'd like we can replace it with one of our other flash drives. Let me know what you'd like to do

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!

Re:Abuse of moderation

[at_slashdot]

I don't know if all this is necessary, I washed and dried my flash drives couple of times and they still work fine.

Re:Abuse of moderation

[just fiddling around]

As an amateur diver, I do NOT recommend gluing your O-ring. These things lose their suppleness and crack, rendering them ineffective.

Make sure the groove is very smooth to prevent nicking the ring, insert the o-ring in it and lube the ring once in a while (once a year should be more than enough) with silicone grease.

As for Epoxy: it should do the job in a pinch, but I would recommend looking at some silicone gelly like Olympus uses for it's Tough cameras. More flexibility = less cracking = less possibility of water seeping to the board. Most USB keys get flexed often in pockets, etc.

Hey, I know it's overkill for a 10$ trinket, but if you gotta do it, you gotta do it in style.

Re:Abuse of moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash drives as manufactured are nearly indestructible.

I was performing a cold-soak test (testing performance at extremely low temperatures prior to sending to space) on a 2GB Kingston flash drive cut out of its case, and actually noticed a slight improvement of performance from around -10 through -50 degrees C, at which point the test was considered successful. There was no sort of data corruption noticed at these temperatures.

Because this didn't do much of anything to the flash drive, I re-tested it but continued lowering the temperature until around -170 C, and this only reduced the IO rate. Eventually, just dunked the drive into the LN2 it was being cooled by, and at first had an issue connecting to it, but on the second attempt it worked fine, and could read and write files without a hitch. When I pulled it out, part of one of the images I wrote was corrupt, but I was still impressed.

The whole trick to the test was to keep the drive unplugged for as long as possible, then only plug it in for about 1 minute to run IOMeter and write and read a file, otherwise the drive would heat itself up quickly.

They're in cereal boxes

[stomv]

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.

4 MiB pages

[tepples]

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.)

Re:eSATA on one side USB on the other?

[RailRide]

One of the drives in the article (OCZ Throttle) functions in this way. The review notes that it still needs a USB port to power it while plugged into SATA.

---PCJ

Trivia:

[RailRide]

"The days of Win98SE driver disks are long gone"

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

Re:1994 Floppy Disc

[petermgreen]

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".

 

Re:1994 Floppy Disc

[nanotech]

nLite is your friend. Slipstream drivers, service packs, hotfixes, plus configure/disable many of XP's annoying defaults

http://www.nliteos.com/

They're not the same

[TheLink]

> 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.