Best USB Flash Storage? 77
Jennifer asks: "I'm thinking of making the plunge and buying some sort of USB flashdisk. I just migrated to a laptop without a floppy, and want some sort of quick and easy medium, preferably bootable, for moving files around. My idea solution would be a SDcard reader that is small, bootable, Hi-Speed USB and sleek/sexy. SD based means I could have a number of cards ready to go, such as a linux card, a Win98 card, maybe even a Win2k card if I could pare the install down to 256MB, plus other stuff, including compatibility with my Palm.
Is booting purely BIOS dependent? What have your experiences been with these things?"
USB Booting (Score:5, Informative)
For instance, I am able to boot off of a USB memory key and a USB Zip drive on an IBM ThinkPad X20/X21, but not a T21. I haven't tried it on the A series or any of the newer T series.
Re:USB Booting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:USB Booting (Score:1)
I'm not quite sure why you would have a need for a bootable drive, since even the largest flash drives aren't going to be enough to be worth it (1-2Gb), plus USB is slow compared to disk. If you really need a smal
Re:USB Booting (Score:1)
Re:USB Booting (Score:2)
Re:USB Booting (Score:1)
Alex
Re:USB Booting (Score:1)
Perhaps something could be done with a floppy
The primary reason to boot off USB nowadays is that fewer and fewer new computers have floppy drives.
Re:USB Booting (Score:2)
booting from usb is a new thing... (Score:1, Informative)
Other alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
CDRW (Score:2, Informative)
In addition to UDF, you need packet write, both "experimental." The packet write stuff I've been able to find seems badly dated. (>12-18 months) Plus it seems to be drive-dependent whether you can do it even with patches.
Do you have some more up-to-date links you could share?
Re:CDRW (Score:3, Informative)
Volume (Score:1)
Re:Other alternatives (Score:1)
I have a 2 yr old burner, and reusing a CDRW is just a pain in the bum, for being very slow. Besides, I hate having around a shitload of half-written CDRs. Furthermore, a 256 Meg USB2 drive is cheaper than a new burner.
der Joachim
Re:Other alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
Really? OfficeDepot (or maybe OfficeMax) just had a 40x CD-RW for free. And you can get them for $20-40 without any rebates or any other hassle. The 256MB USB2 Flash cards have come way down in price, but they're not that cheap yet.
Of course, that's not usable in a notebook
If your burner is slow then your drive is either outdated or you have bad software... modern -RW's run at 32x and can rewrite a full CD in 3 mins. Flash memory is insanely slow in writing, so you'd probably be about even in overall time.
All of that said, I do think a USB dongle device would be more convienent and easier to deal with than CD's -- smaller, easier to change, etc. -- but I had to correct your statement.
Re:Other alternatives (Score:4, Interesting)
Ideally, I would like to find a USB type drive that's cheap, then buy two of them...one for work, one for home. Any suggestions here?
--trb
Re:Other alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
Well those dongle drives come in sizes up to 4 GB but they are only economical up to the 256-512 MB range. If that is enough for you, then go for it!
You can also get USB enclosures for 2.5" notebook hard drives. Get one, put a 20G drive in it and carry it around.
PC card adapter? (Score:3, Informative)
But then you started talking about flash cards, so
If you went with, for example, Compact Flash, you'll have the advantage of being able to use a PC Card adapter. I have little experience with laptops, but I suspect that while you may find the ability to boot off a USB-connected flash card is rare, the ability to boot off a PC Card of some type (or a device connected through a PC Card adapter) is more common. (At about $15 with little effort searching, PC Card adapters are also very cheap.)
Case in point, I have an ancient IBM ThinkPad 560. It's 7 years old I believe
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:1)
cyberRodent
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:2)
Note that CF cards have a finite number of writes before they start killing off cells (100k to 1M being my understanding.) Normal use will not hit this in quite a while, but the swap file Windows uses will in a hurry.
My recommendation : Fill it up with RAM, install Win95 and find the RAMdisk out there for '95 - and set up the system to
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:1)
(I always thought that this kind of setup would make a nice system to read GnuPG messages with since the decrypted messages are never written to a harddisk and are deleted from the ramdisk when the system is shut off.)
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:2)
Are you sure about this? I know other MTDs have this problem, but I thought CF cards used different technology. I'm concerned about this because a CF card is my primary drive for a small linux system
Also, anyone know how to install debian-i386 into a directory on a ppc box? I'm stumped, debootstrap dies on both machines.
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:2)
Google : compactflash rewrites
Some thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB [lexarmedia.com] is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.
Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio [lexarmedia.com] into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.
A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.
And no, I don't work for Lexar Media.
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:2)
So, I'm gonna plead some ignorance here. How do I go about putting a bootable image on a flash card? Even if it's as simple as format f:
Re:PC card adapter? (Score:2)
Anyway, I'd say all you need to do is format f: /s, then copy the contents of the floppy to the flash device. Of course I haven't tried this yet, since I just found out my question got posted when I wasn't looking :(
Password Protection? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Password Protection? (Score:2)
The password support requires a driver. I doubt that linux drivers are available. The solution would be to get a flash drive that does not have some closed source proprietarty security method and PGP your files instead.
Do you really want it bootable? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do you really want it bootable? (Score:2)
Do you have any sources for this speed concern?
And note my intention in bootin
SD doesn't hold as much as MMC! (Score:5, Informative)
A 16mb SD card came with my Palm m500. On the back of the card:
So, MMC is definitely better in this regard.
BTW, the MMC card reader that came with my RCA CC-9390 DVC camcorder works under Linux with the standard USB drivers. It talks SCSI over USB and then the card has a x86 boot sector and partition table indicating a FAT filesystem. It all works. I was quite surprised and impressed.
I don't know if a SD card reader would work under Linux due to all the DRM crapola. I don't know of any open SD reader/writer drivers. There's a closed one for one of the Linux PDAs however.
-molo
SD can hold a lot more (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SD can hold a lot more (Score:2)
oh, and my pentax optio S works just fine as an SD card reader in linux using the usb-storage drivers.
i got a 6 in 1 reader from some company at buy.com for like $9 after rebate and free shipping, i haven't tried it yet.
oh, and DO NOT buy the SD cards from "smart media" they don't have a locking slot and they are thick and don't fit well in a normal slot and mine broke after just one day of use in my camera.
Re:SD doesn't hold as much as MMC! (Score:2)
CF storage is only limited by the filesystem used on it since it is basically ATAPI with different kinds of pins. In fact you can make a CF card work with an IDE adaptor just by knowing how the pinouts matchup. CF is also the first to get new denser storage technology and generally the cheapest per MB. Unless you have something that really demands the smaller form factor (a watch?) I can't see the advantage of any of the other flash technologies for storage (for other I/O devices SDIO is sup
Re:SD doesn't hold as much as MMC! (Score:2)
Re:SD doesn't hold as much as MMC! (Score:2)
The Sharp Zaurus can use SD cards, but the 'security' features aren't present and they use the whole volume - so essentially it treats it as an MMC card.
Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:1, Informative)
I beleive USB 1.1 supports a rate of 12MB/s so it looks anything more (like the 480MB/s of USB 2) wouldn't really help you.
I tend to like compact flash the best of any of the competeing memory standards currently. Once you get that small size doesnt really matter that much to me. It is definitly the cheapest, available in the largest sizes, and from everything I have heard it is by far the most
Re:Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:1)
those are Mega-Bits, not Mega-Bytes
Divide by eight!!
Re:Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:1)
Basically, i want to poitn out that 5-7 MB / sec is actually equivalent to 40-56 mega-bits / sec, whihc is still usb 1.1, so it can take advantage.
that's why you may think w/a USB2 hard drive, you'll never max it out, but that's not the case..
With a nice 7200rpm drive, you can theoretically out-do the wire's capacity. 480 / 8 = 60 megabytes / sec..
Re:Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:1)
Serves me right for trusting advertisers of Flash Card readers to not substitute MB for Mb.
USB 2 would be a substantial improvment.
Re:Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:1)
Re:Check the transfer speed of the medium (Score:2)
Use CompactFlash! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Use CompactFlash! (Score:5, Insightful)
One issue with CompactFlash is that changing bits in one direction is fast and simple, but going the other direction requires a relatively slow erase cycle on an entire block of memory. Then on top of that, the number of erase cycles the part can survive is limited, on the order of 1E5 or 1E6. Lexar advertises smart controller firmware that remaps addresses to level out the load of erasures. In other words, if you toggle address $0F00 a zillion times, $0F00 may reach a different physical address each time so that no one block on the chip goes through a zillion/2 erase cycles.
I don't know how well other vendors handle it. Any CompactFlash nerds here today?
Re:Use CompactFlash! (Score:2, Interesting)
It does reduce wearout, but you should really put any frequently updated and not too important files on a ramdisk.
With my CF based machines, I just did a standard (but minimal) slackware install and then used "find" to locate any files that got touched after leaving the system on for a day. A startup script copies those files into a ramdisk and symlinks them back into the directory tree -- so I got a standard linux install with now wea
Re:Use CompactFlash! (Score:1)
I'm thinking about getting an IDE to CF connector and doing something like this with a cheap laptop.
Re:Use CompactFlash! (Score:1)
Some experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I have booted off my USB2.0/Firewire Asus (SCB-1608-D [asus.com]) DVD-ROM/CDr/CD-RW drive though. It's a very nice drive and I recommend it highly and often. The Asus drive I've even gotten to mount under PS2 Linux and it comes with a handy little carry bag.
Palm as a portable card reader (Score:3, Informative)
Replace the floppy with a floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two things you want to do here. You want to be able to boot your laptop from a removable medium, and you want to transfer data to other systems. I don't see why you have to have a single solution for both. Maybe it's kewl to have a bootable USB key or SD card, but is it practical? Booting from external media is not something you have to do very often, but when you do have to do it, you really have to do it. So you need something reliable. Almost all recent systems can boot from the CD, so why not just burn all the boot images you might need onto CD? Or if you just have to have a read-write bootable device, get a USB floppy. (You'll probably have to buy one from the manufacturer of your laptop to get one that's bootable.) It's old-fashioned, and it isn't good for any serious data transfer, but it's very reliable. And you need reliable.
The second problem is data transfer. Now, the main merit of a USB key is portability. But if your data is already on a laptop, you already have portability. If you want to transfer data between your laptop and another system, why spend a lot of money on a USB key, which requires multiple steps to accomplish the transfer? It's faster and cheaper just to connect the two USB ports directly [devdepot.com].
Re:Replace the floppy with a floppy (Score:2)
That depends on how you define portability -- my USB key fits in my pants pocket. My laptop does not.
Re:Replace the floppy with a floppy (Score:2)
As for floppies and CDs: I never said they were portable. You did read the part of my post where I suggested spl
Re:Replace the floppy with a floppy (Score:2)
Forget SD (Score:1)
No SD, usb+mp3 is neat (Score:3, Interesting)
I got a USB flash drive that is also an MP3 player. It needs no drivers. It's not fancy in any way, but it's pretty cool and less than a hundred bucks for 128mb. It's the "Apacer Audio Steno."
Zaurus (Score:2)
Re:No SD, usb+mp3 is neat (Score:2)
And it has no "DRM" crapola or any restriction on files being put on or off, so far it's great!
Adapter sets are cheap. (Score:1)
Comparing SD & MMC, you might want to consider that an SD card has a write protect switch which MMC & CF do not (but I expect I'll be corrected on that), and is much faster than MMC (up to 10Mbps vs 300kbs or 1Mbps). Ignore MMC.
If you go with CF, a usefu
sorry... (Score:2)
Re:sorry... (Score:1)
best density: smart media (Score:1, Offtopic)
media that you can't tolerate a micro-CD, then SD is
probably too bg for you too. I commend smart media
flash cards. They don't threaten you with potentially
crippling DRM bits, and they are cheaper than MMC
or CF (or at least, the last time I looked, the best sale
prices were on Smart Media cards).
Puppy Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still not convinced that their move from WindowLab to FVWM95 as the default window manager was that clever though. Have they not seen the size of that thing?
Re:Puppy Linux... (Score:1)
Lexar Pro 2.0 USB (Score:2, Interesting)
Even better, many systems detect it when booting to DOS even though it isn't the boot device, which allows you to format
I've installed Win98 on it as well. Works like a champ!
Re:Lexar Pro 2.0 USB (Score:1)
Buy.com has the Lexar USB 2.0 HiSpeed 256MB Jump Drive Floppy replacement for $56.99 after rebate, free shipping.
$15 rebate Exp 9/30/03
JumpDrive (Score:1)
I might wait a bit longer &/or get this ... (Score:4, Informative)
I'd also consider an XDrive II [compgeeks.com] - it's a multiformat digital media reader that also can accept a hard drive. It comes in USB2.0 various flavors. (Bare or with internal HD)
I use the XDrive II [compgeeks.com] in my daily routine. You don't have to have a computer to offload digital media onto the internal hard drive as their is a copy button on the drive with a little LCD indicating status.
IF you have to wait for a thumb drive -- a 1 gig + SD/MMC/XD reader of the Lexar Pro+ Jumpdrive is due out early next year. Also SD is being promised at 1 gig about that time and XD is promised to be 3 gig by the end of 2004. So if you don't like the XDrive suggestion, wait for this drive.
It's both BIOS and drive dependent (Score:1, Informative)
GeIL does email too; defrag helps also (Score:1)
PQI Intelligent stick (Score:2)