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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 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
...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!
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.
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.
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.)
Is there a way to do this on Vista Ultimate 64 bit?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I don't know if all this is necessary, I washed and dried my flash drives couple of times and they still work fine.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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.
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.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
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
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.
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.
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.
I do NOT recommend gluing your O-ring.
Words to live by.
It's actually a direct neural interface. I had a USB port installed in my left ear, ages ago! I'm surprised you haven't heard of it - everyone's doing it these days.