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Data Storage Upgrades

Best USB Flash Storage? 77

Posted by Cliff from the portable-bootable-and- >3-meg-capacity dept.
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?"
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Best USB Flash Storage? More

Best USB Flash Storage?

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  • USB Booting (Score:5, Informative)

    by questionlp ( 58365 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @07:42PM (#6575674) Homepage
    I believe that booting off of a USB port is BIOS dependent since it needs to be able to not only detect that the USB drive is a storage drive but also have a stack to use it like a hard drive or what-not.

    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)

      by keesh ( 202812 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @07:58PM (#6575777) Homepage
      You'll need a bios update for booting off USB on T, A and R series ThinkPads. Should be available on any TP with built-in USB ports (doesn't work if you're going via CardBus). I can boot off any USB stuff on a T30 (hit F12 at boot, Removable Devices -> Whatever).
      • Or, if you have a Thinkpad, just check ebay for an ultrabay floppy. But seriously, why SD? You need a reader for SD, and often need drivers for it. I use a keychain USB flash drive, so that even when I'm at another computer (school labs, office, etc), I always have my important files with me.
        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
    • Perhaps something could be done with a floppy containing just a bootloader and a linux kernel to bootstrap the usb disk, one disk could probably do many operating systems, the question is whether linux would like pretending to be 'merely' a boot loader.

      Alex

      • 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.

    • Yeah... it sucks. I'm doing a case mod project and got a USB floppy thinking I could boot off of it. No such luck; the mobo I'm using doesn't support USB boots. Maybe I'll have to scrap the s370 FlexATX board and shell out the cash for a VIA miniITX board.
  • Unless your laptop is very new, it probably will not be able to boot from the removable USB storage. Check to see if it is an option in the boot order within the BIOS. If not, then you're out of luck, unless there is a BIOS upgrade that enables it.

  • Other alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tchuladdiass ( 174342 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @07:51PM (#6575727) Homepage
    You mentioned that you want to use the usb drive as a replacement for a floppy. What about using your cdrw drive instead? At a buck a pop, cdrw's are much cheaper than flash storage, and with udf filesystem, you can random write to them. If size is a problem, I've seen those 210 meg mini cdr/cdrw's at varisous computer shows (although I don't understand why they cost more than a full size cd). Get a bunch of those, and if you need cases, you can get Gamecube cases (same size disk), and they'll fit in your shirt pocket.

    • CDRW (Score:2, Informative)

      by dpilot ( 134227 )
      Are you doing this?

      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)

        by tchuladdiass ( 174342 )
        It's been a while and was with an older kernel, but I found current instructions at the linux from scratch hints [linuxfromscratch.org] site.
    • They're more expensive because they don't make or sell as many of them. Economies of scale and all that.
    • You mentioned that you want to use the usb drive as a replacement for a floppy. What about using your cdrw drive instead?

      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)

        by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Thursday July 31, 2003 @11:04AM (#6580112) Homepage
        Furthermore, a 256 Meg USB2 drive is cheaper than a new burner.

        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)

      by (trb001) ( 224998 ) on Thursday July 31, 2003 @09:52AM (#6579371) Homepage
      The problem with CDRW is that when you take the discs to other computers, writing on them requires a CDRW drive. I thought about this too, I use the tiny (220Mb?) CDs to carry stuff to work since they fit in my shirt pocket, but I can't transfer anything from work to home because of no burner at work.

      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
      • "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?"

        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)

    by orangepeel ( 114557 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:15PM (#6575885)
    You started by asking about a USB flashdisk, which I interpretted as meaning a USB "memory key" of some type.

    But then you started talking about flash cards, so ... umm ... basically I have no idea if this post is even on topic.

    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 ... it runs on an original Pentium 100 MHz CPU (floating point bug included at no extra charge). I was overjoyed when I realized that this older (yet very well designed laptop) could boot off a "new" technology Compact Flash card simply by using a PCMCIA PC Card adapter. That ability breathed even more life into an old laptop.
    • As I was reading this post I realized that I could use what I was reading to resurrect a P100 (sharp) whose drive had failed - but has 2 greact pcmcia slots. Fantastic!

      cyberRodent
      • Even if it won't boot from the PCMCIA using Compact Flash cards, there are adapters to convert the CF card to a regular or laptop IDE connection - now THAT would be pimpin.

        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
        • Wouldn't Linux/BSD work well in this too? Add a shitload of RAM, install the OS and make all partitions read only except /var and /tmp, which would be mounted on a ramdisk.

          (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.)
        • > Note that CF cards have a finite number of writes before they start killing off cells

          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 :) (Actually, after it boots it mounts /usr /var /bin /sbin /home over NFS)

          Also, anyone know how to install debian-i386 into a directory on a ppc box? I'm stumped, debootstrap dies on both machines.

    • Some thoughts (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday July 31, 2003 @12:45PM (#6581070) Journal
      I just got my own USB dongle drive because my iBook has no floppy. Just to avoid confusion, I'll say this: As far as I'm concerned, USB Key Drives, Thumb Drives, Keychain drives, dongle drives are all the same things: Just a small usb dongle with flash memory hardwired into them.

      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.

    • Your post just resurrected a laptop! I recently acquired an ancient ThinkPad 600E that I need to flash the BIOS on. IBM provides a bootable floppy image for this purpose. Well, the thing is, it's missing the floppy module and the CD-ROM module appears dead. I'd like to give the flash card in the PCMCIA slot a try.

      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: /s, in this case I need to put IBM's exact bios-flashi
      • There's usually nothing special in the boot sector, but occasionally they'll play games by replacing DOS with the flash program, so that there is no OS, just the BIOS, but usually they'll just have autoexec.bat execute the flash program.

        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)

    by retostamm ( 91978 )
    Some USB Flash memories allow Password Protection. Is there Linux support for this feature? A Manufacturer says it only works on Windows, but I find it hard to believe that noone has used that.
    • "Some USB Flash memories allow Password Protection. Is there Linux support for this feature? A Manufacturer says it only works on Windows, but I find it hard to believe that noone has used that."

      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)

    by zsazsa ( 141679 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:20PM (#6575908) Homepage
    Watch out -- SD is slllllllllllllloooooooowwwwww. Other flash formats are faster, but they're still really not suitable for running an OS from.
    • While there are some poorly implemented SD cards are there that perform poorly, I was under the imprssion it was one of the faster formats avaiable, partly owing to its "newness". Unfortunately, I can't find the page that had direct performance numbers right now, but I did find at least this quote

      Despite the highly desirable small number of pins, the SD Memory Card is designed for exceptionally high read/write performance.

      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)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:21PM (#6575914) Journal
    Given the choice between SD and MMC media, you should go with MMC. Why?

    A 16mb SD card came with my Palm m500. On the back of the card:
    Please note that while your new SD card is a 16MB card, only 14.6MB are available for your use, with the remaining 1.4MB in a security area on 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
    • The current maximum size of a MMC is 128MB, but most likely you can only find 64MB cards on the market, on the other hand you can easily find a 1GB SD card.
      • there are a ton of 128 MB mmc on the market. i just got a 256 MB SD card as well.

        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.
    • CF is unlimited!
      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
    • 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.

      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.

  • Flash chip technology advances have allowed flash chips to achieve sustained data transfer rates of 5-7MB/sec [compactflash.org]

    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

  • Use CompactFlash! (Score:5, Informative)

    by PurpleFloyd ( 149812 ) <zeno20NO@SPAMattbi.com> on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:32PM (#6575978) Homepage
    I would strongly suggest using CompactFlash rather than SD. It's faster (no dealing with DRM), and is basically ATAPI: with a $5 reader, you can plug it directly into any ATAPI-compatible computer and boot just like a hard drive. Plus, if you've got your heart set on a full Win2K and Office XP install, Microdrives come in sizes up to 1 GB (although you lose the durability of flash; they're just tiny hard drives in a CompactFlash form factor). Plus, a quick trip to Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] says that CompactFlash is about half the price of SD for any given size, and is availible in a wider range of sizes. You might lose Palm compatability, but, at least to my eye, the benefits outweigh that one loss.

    • Re:Use CompactFlash! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:54PM (#6576104) Journal
      If the original poster goes the route of buying a USB reader and swapping cards in and out, Lexar recently announced CF chips with a 4G capacity. (If you have to ask, you can't afford it).

      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?
      • It's called wear leveling, and yes, the other CF suppliers have it too.

        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
        • Could you give more info on your system? (Parts, how you use it) Using CF to create a bootable ramdisk based system is interesting to me.

          I'm thinking about getting an IDE to CF connector and doing something like this with a cheap laptop.
    • I'd like to know where I can find 5$ CF ATAPI adapters. So far I found them at about 20 $

  • Some experience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @08:38PM (#6576005) Homepage Journal
    For up, I have a review of a very nice USB flash RAM device here [lunacy8m.com]. It's particularly good because it doesn't have any extra features that require drivers in, say, Windows XP. I have not booted off of it though.

    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)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @09:39PM (#6576359) Homepage
    Don't forget that your Palm is already a SD card reader. Just install Palm desktop on multiple machines then you can easily transfer files between them. Oh if you can a Tungsten T or Tungsten C, you can even transfer the files wirelessly.

  • Replace the floppy with a floppy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @10:59PM (#6576791) Homepage Journal
    As usual with an Ask Slashdot, you've jumped to the technology you want to solve your problem, without fully considering the problem.

    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].

    • 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].

      That depends on how you define portability -- my USB key fits in my pants pocket. My laptop does not.

      • Sure, there are degrees of portability. And no laptop is as portable as a USB Key. But the kind that don't come with a floppy are pretty portable. So the question is, how much do you need a little extra portability? This guy doesn't seem to need it very much, since he's talking about getting data from one device to another, not having data on his key ring when all his devices are somewhere else.

        As for floppies and CDs: I never said they were portable. You did read the part of my post where I suggested spl

    • It's almost impossible to fit a bootable linux kernal into a single floppy, that's why distro's with decent hardware support have bootsets that span 3+ floppies. Also floppies are SLOW, flash drives can copy a floppies worth of information in a fraction of a second, a floppy will take upwards of a minute+ to copy that data. Also since I and many others already have flash cards for other devices it's often MUCH cheaper than $32 to get an adapter to work with our laptops to read the flash media of choice.
  • Chances are you won't be able to boot off of USB much less SD. My Toshiba Libretto L5 has a SD card slot built-in and sure can't boot off of it, but I do have the ability to boot from PCMCIA CD-ROM drives, USB CD-ROM drives, USB Floppy Drives, and even PCMCIA drives (supposedly). Furthermore, SD support is practically nonexistent in Linux. Good luck trying to get your SD card reader to work with Linux much less boot. You'll be somewhat luckier with MMC, but it's still not worth trying. The only good alter

  • No SD, usb+mp3 is neat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Thursday July 31, 2003 @12:01AM (#6577122) Homepage Journal
    First, fuck "Secure Digital" media. All that means is that it is DRM-enabled.

    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."
    • Or use a Zaurus, which does not honor the SD DRM components, and sees SD as regular MMC. SD also has the benefit of being faster than MMC, having a 7bit transfer mode instead of 4.
    • Yeah, I've got an Apacer Audio Steno I got for $88 shipped. It's not fancy, but it does what I need quite well. Even does recording with semi-resonable quality considering how small it is. I did record a concert with it and somehow obliterate the files before I could download them though, but it was the first day I had it so I'll chalk that one up to inexperience not a defect.

      And it has no "DRM" crapola or any restriction on files being put on or off, so far it's great!

  • I have 1GB SD with an SD-to-CF adapter and a CF-to-PC card adapter plus a PC card-to-USB adapter. It gets most things done. The adapter set cost about $30.The SD card spends its life rotating between my MP3 player, camera, cellphone & notebook.

    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

  • Slightly off topic, but having just bought a USB keychain (AVB Mobile Drive 128mb version, in the $35-40 range), I was looking for a Linux distro to put on it. Is it possible to boot linux off one of these? I would assume you have to format it. How would you get the boot code on it? Or would it be possible to just use Loadlin with a kernel on the regular Fat16 partition with perhaps a UMSDOS directory?
    • I've found that on odd hardware, MS-DOS and LoadLin form the single most reliable boot method you can find. I've seen computers that make LILO barf, I'm typing on a computer that confounds ISOLINUX, and my laptop at home confounds SYSLINUX and won't run GRUB to save it's life, but LoadLin works everywhere...
  • If you are so keen to have physically small storage
    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)

    by nickos ( 91443 ) on Thursday July 31, 2003 @04:29AM (#6578077)
    If you're interested in trying to get Linux running off a USB flash device, have a look at Puppy Linux [goosee.com].

    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?

  • Lexar Pro 2.0 USB (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lester67 ( 218549 )
    with 256mb. It is sub $100 in price and works great.

    Even better, many systems detect it when booting to DOS even though it isn't the boot device, which allows you to format /s the disk and make a bootable USB with any OS you want on it. (Lexar swears up and down that it is not bootable though.)

    I've installed Win98 on it as well. Works like a champ!
    • Just saw this on TechBargains.com

      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

  • I own a Lexar JumpDrive [lexarmedia.com] and love it. Mine is the older 128M, USB 1.1 version, but they now have the 1G, USB 2.0 version now as well. It's stylish and compact, plus you don't need any additional hardware to read from it, just plug it in the port. I love mine. I don't use my Iomega Zip drive at all anymore. I've not had any experience trying to boot off of USB as my BIOS doesn't support it, but Linux sees the drive itself and it works terrific. I'd imagine that if you can find a BIOS that boots USB, the

  • I might wait a bit longer &/or get this ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Thursday July 31, 2003 @10:34AM (#6579820) Journal
    I have been looking at thumb drives & pen drives for quite some time now. For your solution, you'd be best advised to get a 9 in 1 memory reader (Only $15 at Computer Geeks) This reads SD/MMC/XD/Compact Flash/Memory Stick/Smartmedia - (some formats have more than one type)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most newer motherboard will support USB device bootup, but not all devices will work. Both USB flash drives we reviewed didn't. A CF card with a reader is the way to go, imo. Blatent site spam, but you can look here: http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/mem_store.shtml
  • I just got a GeIL (geilusa.com) 256MB USB2.0 (compatible with 1.1) flash drive, after filling 2 64MB Lexars (both USB1.1). It's durable aluminum construction (these things work until physically damaged) & can send & receive email (storing it in the flash drive) from any PC in the world (Windoze only); also password & secret zip. Nice leather case also. It's skinnier than many USB flash drives (most oval shaped are too fat to fit into some places without extension cable), and it's about as fas
  • I believe it has already been pointed out, but the PQI Intelligent Stick is the smallest usb flash drive on the market, and is only about $35 for 128mb. I think the website is www.istick.biz

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