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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.
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'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!
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...
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.
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.
The first page of TFA has a chart which states the warranty of each one they tested. While it did not go in more depth than "lifetime" or "2 years", it is still in there.
Warranty is important for me when buying expensive stuff that's going to retain it's value. But large flash drives are cheap, and the technology is moving quickly. A 16GB flash drive costs a mere £20 now, and chances are that by the time it fails, I'll be able to buy something much larger and faster for the same price, so the warranty doesn't seem that important. Say you had a lifetime warranty on one of the $200 2GB drives mentioned in TFS and it failed, would you even bother getting a replacement 2GB drive now?
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
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.
Do we get a nice compare and contrast of the rootkits and malware included on these drives?
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.'"
When will we see memory stick models with USB on one end and eSATA on the other?
You might want to read the article.
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.
---PCJ
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.
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
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.
;) 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
Sure it's free but you get what you pay for. I'd rather pay a huge web host that isn't going anywhere for some open-ended FTP storage, than surrender my personal documents to a fly by night startup that could close shop any time!
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.
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.