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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?"
Sounds like they have the same status as the floppy disc did 15 years ago.
Cruise TT
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
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.
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.
I do NOT recommend gluing your O-ring.
Words to live by.