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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?"
...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!
All you want is waterproof?
USB drives are super cool like that. (No moving parts!)
All you need is a little 2-part epoxy.
Take apart your flash drive (any!) and simply coat the green / black components with as much epoxy as you can stuff into it's exterior shell..
Now, the cap, buy a thin o-ring from your local hardware store, using a knife or dremel, cut a very narrow groove around the inside of your cap. Carefully use epoxy (sparingly here!) to secure the o-ring..
This might not be 100% water proof, but I'm pretty sure it would be very water resistant.
-Cheers,
Cory!
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.
Why won't anyone manufacture one with a white matte finish? That way they could be written on.
Damn! I remember buying one of the very first flash drives, back in about 2000 or so. $50 for an IBM-branded 8 MB. 8 Megs, no typo.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
And I thought I was the only one that did that. So far, I've left my SanDisk Cruzer (4GB) Ti-Plus in my pocket eight times when washing. About half that time they remain through the drying cycle.
Since then, I've backed up my data and reformatted the drive prior to copying the data back to it. No problems so far. Quite amazing given that soap breaks the surface tension of water, so I'm guessing the chip is 100% water tight.
Life is not for the lazy.
Really? That's extremely strange considering that the operating system and browser which I am using to type this message are running off of a 16GB OCZ Rally2 which I am holding in my hand. Here, I'll read what it says on the body, again ...
Yep: It still says OCZ Rally 2 16GB.
I can back up what "drsmithy" said - the read and write performance on these is excellent, which is why I chose it in the first place. If you want to be able to carry around a portable linux system with you, r/w speed matters a great deal. Ubuntu running off of my old no-name flash drive took about twice as long to boot up, and firefox would go inactive for a minute at a time, on a regular basis. Plus doing updates really, really sucked. Now, running off the Rally2, I rarely have any such problems.