What are people storing on all these massive USB sticks? I'm not being snarky, it's an honest question. I can't even fill up half of my Macbook's 256GB SSD and I would consider myself a "power user." Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix have drastically decreased my storage needs.
I would humbly suggest you rethink what the term "power user" means.
Even my parents have saturated their 256GB home computer drive with pictures and videos of their grandkids and nieces and nephews as well as various old time radio programs and old movies courtesy of archive.org.
I'm an amateur photographer myself and just since I got a decent rig 5 years ago I've amassed something north of 300GB of photo stills. Add in a music writing hobby, some VM images, artwork and a decent retrogaming archive and I'm well over a couple of TBs.
My personal MP3 collection (amassed over a decade or so) is around 200GB by itself. If you can find me a decent streaming music service that'll handle that I'd switch, but even Google music saturates after 20,000 files, and the web interface is virtually unusable at those volumes.
Just a personal anecdote, the lessons of which would not, of course, apply to everyone:
I used to have a multi TB collection of old games, movies, shows, music, etc.– and then one day it hit me: I was never realistically going to consume it all in my life. I was just hoarding it "just in case".
I bought a 1 TB external HD, and copied on it my ultimate favorites (lossless rips of my favorite albums, backups of my favorite shows/movies/games- the kind of thing that I go back to regularly, and would want to watch again in 20 years or share with my kids), and now when I want to see a movie/play an old game/etc. that I haven't experienced before, I just buy/download it (I've also found that buying those things physically contributes to their proper enjoyment) and consume it right away, and then delete it.
I've found that switching my data consumption from a "queuing" model to a "just in time" model has saved me money, time, and headaches (of course data that's unique in that it can't be obtained anywhere else, like personal pictures, is backed up to Dropbox- but even then, I more often than not realize that I don't need 5GB of vacation pictures- a well curated selection of 100 or so is more than enough).
I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy? Netflix killed any remaining point to owning them. I have boxes and boxes of DVDs in the basement, no longer having any meaning.
As for my large music collection, I listen to that every day (set on random shuffle). I enjoy it very much, and it's large enough that I don't overplay ones I like and ruin them.
I do hoard books and magazines, though. My huge book collection isn't remotely available via googling them, nor are most available as ebooks. And old magazines? fuggedaboudit.
So I cut & scan books as a background task, such as when waiting for a test suite to complete. Each book consumes 20 to 30 Mb, so that adds up. The scanned paper copy goes in the recycle bin, and I enjoy using a tablet or netbook to access my library from anywhere in the house, at any time.
I only wish my ebook readers had enough storage to put my whole library on them (about 60Gb now, and growing daily).
Regarding music, I see albums as integral wholes, so I very rarely listen to a single track, and almost never use the "shuffle" feature of my music player.
When working, I just play an album in its entirety- I have about ~80 albums that I would say make up for 90% of the music I listen to (and I've been slowly but surely collecting the vinyls for these albums- there's something nice about owning a physical object containing the very essence of something I love). For this very reason, I have loved Spotify ever since I got in its early days beta, and have never gotten the appeal of services like Pandora/Rdio/etc.
I do have a quite large collection physical books, most of them on various academic topics. I wouldn't want to have them in a digital format: because of their low print runs, they are comparatively expensive and hard to find, so I have some (shameful) pride in my curated collection; additionally, it'd be hard to read them digitally because you often go back and forth between sections, which is a nightmare on a tablet.
I tried using a kindle for reading novels, and I really loved it; but after a year or so, I just naturally migrated back to physical paperbacks. Not sure why, but being able to have a nice curated collection on a bookshelf and being able to lend them painlessly definitely contributed.
Your point about magazines reminds me of all the magazines that I accumulated as a kid, that got thrown out by my parents when I moved because they would just pick up dust in the attic; oh, how I wish that I had scanned them before they did so! Sometimes I want to refer someone to some article I read years, if not decades ago, and I just can't find it because it was written in a magazine pre-ubiquitous web era.
Just a small note, I use Rdio. If it has Pandora like features, they are as off to the side as Spotify would have them. I only use Rdio to listen to whole albums I choose. Though no real reason for why Spotify/Rdio would be better than the other
I'm surprised that even old computer magazines are simply not available online. I subscribed to QST as a boy, I wish I had those now!
I hear what you say about expensive books, I have several that I was surprised to find out were worth more than $100. Those I just put at the back of the scan queue to decide later, there are plenty more $2 books to go first.
My comic book collection has vanished. Arggh.
One of the reasons I prefer my books digital now is I can blow them up on a large monitor - makes 'em easier to read with my old eyes. If my eyes get as bad as my dad's, I plan on installing a projector and blowing them up on the wall.
> I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy?
Apart from that there's a couple of films I gladly re-watch (for instance when a friend hasn't seen Total Recall or Waking Life yet), I also keep them around for another reason. It's nice to be able to remember a scene or a quote and be able to look it up easily. And sometimes I do a bit of hobby/amateur sound editing, and it's a great archive of cool soundbites :)
So yeah, I'm keeping around way more than I'll ever watch or re-watch, but the nice thing about having all that storage is you don't have to worry about which data you're going to need in the future.
And for music, there's the added trouble of remembering and finding all those titles. I lost a HD with about 50GB of mp3s on it once, messy but also sorted in various ways, and I'm never going to get that exact collection back. Just over the past couple of weeks I was wrecking my brain trying to remember what was that dark post-apocalyptic ambient album I used to have--though it was a nice exercise in memory, I asked my friends they didn't know, and suddenly one morning in bed it came to me (Bad Sector - Ampos, for those who wonder) ... it's really quite amazing what tidbits of memories one can dig up if you just try hard enough and mull over it for a couple of weeks :)
Still, this discussion is more about those multi-TB harddisks than it is about keychain USB sticks, right? Although 64GB is quite a chunk.
I just want to point out that this conversation is specific to the USA. Most people in most non USA countries don't have access to the same volume and quantity of streaming content (movies, music, even magazines). Very few people would ever suggest Canadian Netflix could take the place of a good DVD library.
If what my parents do, in their clumsy sort of non-technical way, in the normal course of taking pictures and videos with their $75 point and shoot and downloading a few movies to watch without having to eat into their monthly bandwidth quota everytime my mom wants to watch one of a handful of old movies is "data hoarding" and exceeds the capacity of the machine a "power user" is using, then I think that both of these descriptors have lost all effective meaning.
A better analogy would be somebody who fills their trunk with their weekly groceries and commutes 60 miles total per day being considered the same as either an F-1 driver or a long haul trucker -- when their use cases for their vehicle are pretty normal.
iTunes Libraries - Just a few television series subscriptions will wipe out a 256 GB disk instantly - meaning you are constantly juggling files offline. I carry a lot of 64 GB SD cards.
My "Online Local" Aperture Vault is currently 75 GB. The EOS 7D pictures are 10MB each. I spend a _lot_ of time deleting/moving photos offline, but the CF Flash I put in my camera is 64 GB, So just filling that one up (which I can do in a weekend, without much trouble) would be half of my Aperture Photo collection. Aperture has the ability to store your photos "Offline" on a secondary storage - which is where the majority of my photos are (only thumbnails are kept local)
I've taken some 2 GB Videos with my iPhone. Having a Video SD Card is nice.
VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly. And, you rarely need them in your system.
256 GB is painfully small. 512 GB would be filled up quickly. I could probably get by with 1 TB, with the 3TB Drive on my desk to shuffle off less frequently viewed Video seasons.
The nice thing about SD/USB Flash drives is you can stick them into your laptop, _and leave them there_ without having to futz around with a cable and a separate spinning hard drive. Then, when you don't need the photos/VMware/Video/TV Season - you just swap another one in.
I'd love to have a 128 GB _Fast_ USB Flash drive - those would be awesome.
VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly.
This. I tend to make many snapshots, especially of Windows VMs, since they cannot be reconstructed as quickly as a Linux VM. Virtual machines plus snapshot get big quickly.
bup looks like a great tool; thanks for mentioning it.
But ghshephard and danieldk are using VMware, which already creates snapshots using deltas, not entire copies. So their snapshots should already be very efficient.
VMware virtual disks are copy-on-write disks. When you open a VM and start writing to the virtual disk, it creates a new .vmdk (virtual disk) file and writes the changes to that file. (Persistent disks are an exception; changes are written directly to the original .vmdk file.)
When you take a snapshot, it simply freezes the current .vmdk file(s) and starts writing to a new one. It's very quick and efficient. Restoring a snapshot is equally quick and efficient: VMware simply goes back to the .vmdk(s) that make up that snapshot, opens a new scratch .vmdk for further disk writes, and you're ready to go.
You can go back to an old snapshot, make some changes, and save this as a new snapshot. Then you end up with a tree of snapshots, each one using only the disk space needed for the changes that went into that virtual disk.
Of course, even though these delta disks are fairly space-efficient, it still adds up when you use a lot of snapshots!
One trick I use when I create a Linux VM is to create three separate virtual disks for it: a normal .vmdk with snapshot capability for most of the filesystem, plus two smaller nonpersistent .vmdk's for swap and /tmp. I start those two .vmdk's as persistent disks (no snapshot, changes are written directly into the original .vmdk) and then switch them to nonpersistent mode immediately after creating the disks. Nonpersistent disks write their changes to a temporary delta .vmdk when is discarded when the VM is powered down, so writes to /tmp and swap do not go into the snapshots.
I should do this with my Windows VMs too - putting the temp directory and swapfile on nonpersistent disks would help cut down the size of the Windows snapshots.
I think that this is a use case for a NAS, not for flash drive which is designed to be mobile not to store a lot of data.
I don't even own a flash drive (my wife has few, but she needs them in school) I have a single 1TB drive attached to my network, there I store all my data (and rsync it to outside backup). This disk is almost full now and I'll look into buying something bigger.
Why would I need to carry GBs of music/tv shows in my pocket? Just in case I need to watch some episode or listen to that one song right away? :)
There is still no (to my knowledge) killer NAS setup for music.
Everything is slow, or messy, or has a crap interface. Sometimes all three. Then you take your laptop out of your house and you don't have access to any of your music.
iTunes Match is the closest I've gotten. I pay for the upgraded storage and its enough to store my entire music library. Anywhere I go I can listen to anything I own with no delay (assume a decent network connection).
I've had a similar experience with Google Music. I have iTunes Match for my iOS/Mac devices, but prefer Google Music as it works on my Android devices and anywhere a decent web browser is. If there was a nice web interface for iTunes Match so my play counts and playlists synced nicely, I'd probably use that, but for now Google Music works.
Bonus benefit of iTunes Match + Google Music is that I can redownload my older iTUnes songs DRM-free so the uploader will pull them in.
It does if it can't find matches for your tracks. This will happen generally with obscure tracks or live recordings, but sometimes it just fails to match things that are clearly in the iTunes store too.
My Synology NAS coupled with a Squeeze Box service is fantastic.
The Synology NAS does include the Squeeze Box service software that can easily be streamed and played seamlessly on your PC or on a physical Squeeze Box server.
My wife and I utilize box in our house and have had zero issues with network latency, file indexing, and general performance.
As do I. I use the MiniSub Chrome app when I'm listening on a desktop computer, the included web interface when I'm importing or curating my library, and iSub on my iPhone/iPad.
I'm only a week or so into this setup, but I'm loving it so far - I really feel like I have control over my music once again, vs. Spotify which I'm planning to downgrade to the free edition.
A NAS is obviously the better option if you're always working in the same location, but for people like me who often move between locations it's much more convenient to use one or two large flash drives.
For instance it's much easier for me to keep my VMWare images and snapshots on a flash drive and back that up to a home disk once a day, because it means I can use the images wherever I happen to be. Mostly that's just between home and the office, but that's not always the case.
I have the regular assortment of (multiple) generations of NAS devices at home and in the office as well. But, when you want to go throw that Windows 7 image onto VMware and use it for a few days, or you want to do some editting of your family vacation photos, or you happen to be on a business trip to brazil, it's _really_ nice to be able to just pop a USB/SSD into your laptop and edit/view a way. I sync back to my external drive/NAS when I get back into the office/home.
For those of us who travel for extended periods of time, USB/SSD Flash Drives are a nice alternative to external Hard Drives and/or spending a fortune on Internal Drives w/Apple
HD video is huge - if you just rip your blurays directly they can easily be e.g. 80gb for a 13 episode series. Even reencoded you'll want to make it probably 6gb. I'm guessing you're in the US where there's a lot more available on streaming services like Netflix? Unfortunately that hasn't really made it to the rest of the world yet.
But surely no one stores games on flash drives :) (Why would anyone?) They are to be installed on disk and work from them.
Also I don't see much point in storing episodes on SSD when HDD would be enough (unless you do some video editing).
With combined capacity and transfer rates (via USB 3.0) like these, I don't see any reason not to store games on a flash drive like this.
Why would someone? A lot of people are now using SSDs as their system drives. Given the cost of SSDs, a lot of people end up with 128/256GB system drives, which doesn't give them much space for non-system storage.
Transferring, for instance, the steamapps directory between machines is an utter pain over anything other than a very fast network. It's not that I want to store big stuff there, it's that I want a fast conduit.
I like putting games on flash drives, be it for transferring or sharing with friends. DRM and installation requirements nowadays (ie "unportable" games) make that impossible though. I don't buy modern games.
ahh but you don't live in Canada, $50+ a month of 75gb of bandwidth, its much cheaper to store steam backups on drive, especially if your friend already has a local backup, then to download again.
Additionally moving from university, internet came with residence, to moving back home, I find myself reverting back to using usb, before I used to stream all my music/video via youtube and other networks, now I download, used dropbox a lot of files, but the now I've gone back to usb. It's like travelling back in time...
I switched to teksavvy and it's great. It was twice as fast a Rogers and cheaper. I routinely use about 250GB/month on teksavvy.
I had a lot of problems with quota when I was on Rogers because my VPN connection to work could use up 30G/month when working remotely for long periods of time doing 60-70 hour weeks.
are you on teksavvy cable or dsl? they setup cost is so high around $180, that i dont want to take cable which is at higher speed in my area 28mbs, while dsl is 15mbs, and realize there is too much congestion in the shared hub, $180 down the drain
Try Acanac, they don't have a setup fee, and they have a 30 day money-back guarantee. Their customer service is pretty bad though, so be prepared to be persistent if you have issues. Once it's up though... works great.
Not everywhere you have Internet connections powerful and reliable enough to stream video in tolerable quality, not to mention the availability of services in different countries. Massive sticks are handy for things like coming over to a girlfriend with a movie to watch, etc.
Yeah, I live in NYC and have "high-speed" internet from Verizon and it's still crap most evenings. Like I've got to let videos buffer for a few minutes before watching them. I would definitely pay an extra 50 bucks a month for internet if it were reliably fast but I'm not sure such a thing exists in most parts of the US.
My lifetime picture library is around 100GB. Actually, it doesn't fit in my MBAir's 128GB SSD, so I need to have it on an external HD.
Then, if we start counting work files... many of us work in data analysis, and the datasets can easily reach terabytes. Being able to process them on an SSD is an incredible improvement over a regular HDD. We are talking about data so large that doesn't fit in RAM.
It's a MicroSD adapter designed specifically for the MacBook Air, so it sits flush within the SD card slot. I just put 64GB card in mine and store my libraries there.
I have a choice of buying an old, slow, 4 GB stick, or buying a fast new 32 GB stick.
I'm not going to use the extra capacity, but it's there so it might be useful some day. I am going to use the speed, and the price per X is usually better for the new drives. (Where X is speed or capacity or whatnot).
It'd be great if we could easily partition USB sticks. I'd keep some OSs on a few partitions and data on another.
I'm also interested in the file system used on these huge sticks, and the gentle frustration of moving between various OSs.
Anyone that works with videos, 3d models, images and music can easily fill up alot of space. I have been working on a short 15-minutes clip, so far I got 3 takes using about 70GB in total, just for that, and that isn't even in full HD, less than 30 fps and it's using frame compression. Not all content is available in netflix or spotify, and not everyone got access to those as well.
I wonder myself. I tried to find a use case for USB drives for myself, but can't.
Having a Synology Diskstation at home with a gigabit network means any data storage or transfer problems are taken care of. Most of my other data is network-accessible. I am rarely in a bandwidth-limited place, and even if I were to be in such a place I'd find it hard to plan ahead what to put on a USB stick.
Almost certainly. You'd need a marketing gimmick to let people know that this drive is optimised for speed. You'd need to let people know that this is easier than eSata or whatnot (and more available) and what they can expect over USB 3 and USB 2.
Add in some foolproof encryption and you've increased your market to anyone working in healthcare.
I wish there was a market for the opposite: not very fast (say, as fast as 7200 rpm hdds), but cheap and biiiig (2 TB) for a laptop. I'd buy that even if it was five times more expensive than a 2 TB HDD (just so I don't have to worry about moving parts).
Personal photos and HD videos (Netflix is good, but they tend not to feature films of my kids!). Also software ISOs, either for transfer/burning to DVD/CD or as Linux "live" sticks for booting and running from. Individually these don't usually add up to the capacity we're talking about, but in aggregate they can start reaching that kind of figure fairly easily.
I usually have one with every file I own. I don't watch video or listen to music, so thumb drives are plenty large enough for that. Any source code is all in off site source control too, of course.
The rest I keep around are just for file transfers. Although even those have many GB on them because I keep a full Android development setup ready to go to help out at hackathons.
Streaming helps, but "consumption content" was never a big issue for me, even when I had to store it locally. Menwhile, "production content"---audio samples for music production, high res textures, effect plugins etc. have always taken up an order of magnitude more, and I can never have enough with me.
When I used to do IT work a few years ago I would use a large key drive as my general rescue drive. I would keep a 4-8GB OS partition and the remainder of the drive would store various disk images I needed. This meant I always had Mac OS X 10.4-10.6 handy in case a computer needed a reinstall.
It's easy to fill up huge amounts of space with entirely legal content, as others here have pointed out. Photos, home movies, VMware images, iTunes downloads, large datasets, etc. all take up huge amounts of space.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "portable". You can pick up a 512GB SSD (~$350) and pop it in a USB 3.0 enclosure (~$30). That's not USB stick sized, but you can get it down to about 3" x 5" x 0.5" which is not too shabby.
Or if you're crazy, you can get four 128GB sticks (~$450) and a USB 3.0 hub ($30) and set up a RAID.
>What are people storing on all these massive USB sticks? I'm not being snarky, it's an honest question. I can't even fill up half of my Macbook's 256GB SSD and I would consider myself a "power user."
An hour of HD video from a camera is several GBs.
A single 16MP photograph is around 10-12MB.
150 albums in a good quality mp3/aac encoding, can easily take around 15-20 GB.
Add some classic movies you have ripped to watch, at 0.7-3 GB a pop.
Several years worth of emails goes to another 2-3GB.
Your iPhone backups? Several GB's depending on the model and number of apps you have installed.
The OS is around 3-5 GB itself (Mac OS, for example).
20 common applications, can easily get to 2-3 GB.
And that's for common folks. For a pro-something?
A suite, like Adobe Creative Suite, with the templates and all, goes to 10GB+.
And if you want to install the whole of Logic Pro 9, that's like 70GB right there.
Eclipse or XCode? Another GB.
A few VMs to develop/test on? Several tens of GBs.
This is a very subtle advert. So quick digging raises one interesting question: Are they being paid by Patriot?
Clearly they're using Amazon referral links here but that image at the bottom of the article is both professionally taken and unique to this article (I put it into Google Image search and TinyEye - neither had relevant results).
If they are being paid by Patriot then I would suggest it is immoral not to say that in the advert/article.
that image at the bottom of the article is both professionally taken and unique to this article (I put it into Google Image search and TinyEye - neither had relevant results)
It has been rotated. A Google Images search for "Patriot Magnum" found a number of similar images:
That's a cheap jab. In this case Jeff Atwood in these years would have 'advertised' programming chairs, video cards, SDD disks and many more tech products.
I see only the genuine excitement of a tech geek over a new technology.
I will be definitely looking for a USB 3.0 stick, regardless of the brand, I didn't even notice what brand it was until you pointed to it.
This blog post is, at least in part, a revenue generator for the blog (because of referral links). My question was, did it also generate revenue from the company who's products it links to/talks up?
If it had have been (or is) then I would consider that immoral. This immorality has zero to do with making money from the blog post and everything to do with a potential conflict of interests (between his commitment to his readership and the company that would be paying him).
The Amazon referral links have no such conflict of interests as he could equally have linked to any manufacturer's products and get the same revenue.
Regardless of how you meant it, it is a cheap jab. You speculated without proof that Atwood engaged in immoral behavior. That is a pretty bad thing to do.
Speculation is speculation. I went to great pains to mention that it was a question/concern. I also provided enough proof to at least justify said speculation (i.e. it wasn't totally idle).
I disagree that is is, within its self, a bad thing to do. We should hold people in the public eye to account, in particular when we spot what might be potential conflicts of interests.
No, you made a declarative statement at the very beginning of your comment that 'This is a rather subtle advert.' By doing so, you're poisoning the well for any questions that you pose afterwards. Your theory about the product image turned out to be wrong, and saying that you're just asking questions when you've previously stated opinions as fact is not really convincing.
I don't even like Jeff Atwood much, but I advise that you let this one go and next times ask questions before shooting.
I agree that if it was an advertising then it would be... well, 'immoral' is a strong word, but I get your point.
Simply I don't think that's the case. I follow his blog every now and then, and I never was under impression I was being sold something.
If people would perceive something like this, I think the damage to the image of the blog would largely offset any financial gain of 'sponsoring' a particular product.
Jeff has been blogging for years, has an incredibly successful company behind him, and probably more money that he knows what to do with.
For the life of me I cannot see him 'selling' his blog like that.
You're operating under the assumption that advertising this would be immoral. I submit that we're consuming a product by reading the blog, and, to Mr Atwood, working with Seagate could be seen as kosher B2B development. Especially if he believed in the product, and insisted on complete editorial control.
(Personally, I do believe a notification would be appropriate in the case I described)
I'm going to lean on the side of Jeff Atwood simply being genuinely enthusiastic about the technology and sharing. I've followed his blog for a while and have ever thought that he was a shill. I'd hope that he made enough while at Stack Overflow to not need to be one.
I don't see it that way. To me, it raised my awareness of USB 3.0 storage speeds. I won't necessarily click any links or buy that specific device without further investigation. And if I did buy through an affiliate link, I would be happy that Jeff earned some money for his post.
If I were paid to write that blog post then that's exactly how I'd want you to see it too. Not being a fan or anti-fan of Jeff Atwood myself I feel, as an objective observer, that if this wasn't an ad then my name isn't Bill. I read this thinking I was going to read about SSDs then I thought it was about USB 3 and then it wasn't long before I was being sold the Blue SuperSoonic Dongle 3000. He mentions it by its full name a bunch of times and does a comparison, albeit indirectly, with other USB drives, and on and on. I work in marketing. I know when I'm being marketed to. Its part of my job to market to others in this really subtle way. I wish I was this good.
As far as I can tell, he wrote the full name one time. The word "patriot" only appears once as well. Just in case he used that for shorthand, eg "this patriot drive..."
And, yes, since it's a USB 3 drive, it is only natural for one to think "but how much faster is that than USB 2? does it stack up?"
I dunno. I'm not denying there's an affiliate link, but I think you're looking for something that's not there. Jeff gets excited about tech. At the bottom, there are several more posts about SSDs and SSD performance.
Alright Sally, given his history of talking about consumer goods what makes this one stand out as a paid advert? Or if he is just a shill, who paid for the last one where he praised the Nexus 7 and Surface RT, or that one about the automatic cat food feeder?
Gut instinct. It feels like an advertisement and I've yet to come across something that felt like an advertisement that wasn't. What made me think of it was an ad was just the way it was put together. It wasn't like other posts about comsumer electronics. Without even having to analyze it at all it just jumped out as being formulaic.
I'm not saying he's a shill and I couldn't care less if he were. I'm just saying that came off like an ad. And if someone paid for his Nexus 7 and Surface RT posts it would probably have been the people who make or sell those things. How should I know?
If Jeff Atwood was paid to write this I don't give a shit. If he wasn't paid but was asked to write it I still don't give a shit. If the link to the USB stick is an affiliate link then I'd happily click it to get to the purchasing page if I wanted to buy it. None of that stuff bothers me. This isn't an issue of something I take issue with. I'm just saying this comes off as subtle marketing, that's all. When I read Coding Horror I hope to read some interesting stuff, not see an advertisement disguised as a post. But even that's something I don't take much issue with. Its disappointing but I just close the tab, go about my day, and maybe another time there will be a better post.
Well, yes. Of course it is, but that's precisely because one of the best ways to advertise a product is to make the ad look like an honest, positive review from a trusted source.
So by your standard, every "I like this product" post on every well-read blog should be suspiciously viewed as potentially paid advertisement. That seems way too far off the cynical deep end to me...
Refer to the “More Buying Choices” section on the right side of the page. Amazon.com sells this item for $74.99 but is temporarily out of stock (perhaps due to Jeff’s post), so they are showing me an offer from “Hot Deals 4 Less” for $84.46.
You should still have the option to backorder from Amazon.com, but there is no estimated delivery date listed.
He's a poor salesman then, considering that not too long ago he was raving about how the Intel SSD was the only one worth using.
I suspect he, like most bloggers, makes liberal use of affiliate links and targeted marketing. I think he's admitted in the past that every new product gets shipped to him asking for a review and I'm sure that comes with pro level artwork.
Apparently a lot of them have really horrible random read and especially random write performance. That probably doesn't matter too much for how most people use the drives (moving large files), but would make them less useful as a disk replacement.
The 32GB+ ones are the only drives with enough chips to have full write speed; the 16GB drives usually don't have the full number of chips, so write speeds are 50%.
Does the SanDisk Extreme post speed ratings? It looks like the flash drive shown in the article has some of the fastest posted speeds, at 200 MB/s read, 120 MB/s write. The SanDisk Extreme doesn't post speeds, it appears, but just says "up to 10 times faster* than USB 2.0" and I can't figure out what the asterisk refers to.
This is the kind of thing I'd defer to Tom's Hardware or maybe Ars Technica or something for a comprehensive comparison, but I've never gone wrong in buying Sandisk products (except when in Asia, where 90% of the devices, even at "real" stores, were counterfeit with less than advertised storage capacity; I ended up having a friend buy real products from Amazon and bring them to me when she flew in).
> ... it is a bit chunkier in width than my previous USB flash drive. It might be a bit more to carry, and might not fit some USB ports depending on what's adjacent.
I hate these, both USB devices and wallwarts that block adjacent sockets. Frankly I think that USB forum should have specified max dimensions for USB plugs/devices and matching minimum spacing for ports.
The USB spec defines maximum plug sizes and minimum port spacings, different for all connector series (A/B/mini x/micro x). USB A plug/device dimensions are specified as 16x8mm MAX, i don't remember minimum spacing between A ports and google isn't cooperating, but it's also defined somewhere in there. There are some problems however:
If you don't want to put an USB logo on your device or otherwise use USB trademarks you don't need to follow the spec to the letter and USB IF can't do anything about it (see every other usb novelty device like lamps, fans etc).
If your device is too large you just need to ship it with an extension cable and it's ok.
Apple's proposed spec (infered from their hardware) is max width of USB dongle equals width of USB port. Not neccessarily unfair either. If you want girth, add some cable.
One huge issue I've had with USB sticks on my keychain - the stick breaking off at the keychain loop and losing the stick. I keep the important stuff on encrypted disk images and immediately change my SSH keys when I notice the stick is gone, but losing the actual stick is an inconvenience.
Looking at the photo of the Magnum stick, I can't imagine that stick staying attached to a keychain for more than a couple of weeks.
Doesn't anyone make a USB stick actually designed to be used on a keychain? My VW car fob has lasted 14 years so it can't be that difficult. All the sturdy models I've seen on Amazon or Newegg have horrible reviews for reliability reasons.
For several years I kept my ssh keys on my phone so it was always on me. When I need it I plop it in the dock and it would both charge and be mounted in linux and in my .ssh/config it would point to the mount point for those keys. Just another alternative.
In order to avoid this problem, I bought one of these microSD "sticks" a couple of years ago: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HGFKR8. I also bought a miniature lobster claw hook (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HFEQ3W) to attach it to my keychain. It worked amazingly well: the stick never got lost because it attached to my keychain via the base instead of the cap, it was tiny enough to never get in my way, and the memory was upgradable to boot. On the downside, speeds were pretty slow and the microSD card occasionally got dislodged, but these were relatively minor issues for me when compared to the benefits. Unfortunately, it bit the dust a couple of months ago — wonder if there are any faster alternatives?
You'd need to be careful that the RAID system knew which USB stick was which, even if they were reconnected to different USB ports/controllers. The ZFS demo above does this, but you might need to be careful with other software RAID systems.
But part of the advantage here would be to have your OS on a portable stick and move it between computers. If you're booting from one of the USB devices then it would be a bit trickier to set up RAID as well.
Hey dumbass USB has has serial numbers since USB 2.0 your poor man's software-raid-on-a-chip that came with your mobo might not check drive serials and rely on port but don't make shit up.
The parent does share a good thing that's not always immediately thought of.
Yes, USB devices do have serial numbers - absolutely. A lot of systems will however not care and just mount at random, if it's automounted. As an example, on Desktop machines - this is very common. You might use a Desktop for doing this.
It's a good idea to combine the parents parent post with the, sadly, only good nugget out of it.
Be careful to think over what happens when you restart/unplug the drives. Will the mount points change? If so, be sure to configure up the mounting of the drives with the USB ID of the device.
(USB ID is found with for example the `lsusb` program, you'll probably need to install an extra package to get it)
Just a caution that these USB flash drives tend to have good sequential performance but lousy random write performance. So for copying lots of small files the performance might still be quite low. The reason is sequential performance is easy to achieve with NAND flash and a simple controller but random performance requires a powerful controller and better algorithms.
Thanks for the correction, you're right. I'm going to leave the title of the submission for now though, to keep it consistent with the title of the actual blog post.
As with many corner cases of English grammar, I don't think there is such a decisive answer here that we can call him absolutely right or absolutely wrong, but FWIW his approach ('a' vs 'an' selected based upon the pronunciation of the acronym) is _much_ more common in my experience and is generally accepted.
Wait a second - as I understand it, an empty, brand new flash drive is guaranteed to outperform an empty, much used flash drive. As I understand it, the performance degrades with usage. So, what will be the performance of his fancy new drive after a similar amount of use as his old one?
Is it just me or are any of you checking whether linked products are affiliate links before clicking on them? My mental estimate of the unbiased-ness of a review reduces irrespective of article author when I observe affiliate links to products. Is that inappropriate?
I wouldn’t call it “inappropriate,” but I would be realistic about how much weight you give that data point.
If you searched Google for “usb 3.0 flash drive” and found a random page full of affiliate links, that would be one thing. Jeff has been blogging for almost a decade and has earned some level of trust from his readers.
On the other hand, some bloggers do choose to explicitly disclose where they use affiliate links. I don’t think that is a bad idea but am not offended that he did not.
The author here is very highly respected in this community and already made his big bucks with other projects. If he says that he found something cool and then uses an affiliate link, it's a 99.9% chance that there's nothing more too it.
Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.
Of course, I've been reading Jeff's posts for some time and know his creds. My question was not really very specific to him and this post of his, but just this time I caught myself mid-thought wanting to check whether the link is an affiliate link. For another author, I might not have been surprised, but I was in this case.
Mentioning that a link is an affiliate link (as cwd71 wrote) would be enough for me to put more trust in an author.
Best use for this IMO would be to carry around VirtualBox and some Ubuntu images to have your dev setup with you wherever you can drop in a USB system. Then again, if you just SSH into your system any place you have wifi, it's kind of the same thing 90% of the time.
Assuming the USB 3.0 works as advertised for all cases... It's probably much better than it used to be, but I've plugged in devices claiming to be "USB3.0" into my USB 3.0 slot, and gotten very pedestrian speeds.
After losing all the data on a 4GB USB stick when it simply decided it was time to bite the bag, I have become more anxious about using an SSD as the boot and system drive in my home desktop machine. When I installed Win7, I relocated Users to a separate mechanical hard drive (which is backed up onto a Synology NAS RAID), and now I'm thinking of copying Program Files and Program Files (x86) to another mechanical drive. Am I being overly paranoid? or is this something I should have done from the get-go?
Even though I enjoy most of his blog posts (and learnt a lot from them) and subscribed to his RSS feed, I have to agree with this... This particular blog post feels like a personal post, something that I expect to see on my FB/Twitter feed rather than HN's front page...
Huh...AFAIK, that Stack Careers ad is at the bottom of most of Atwood's posts...it's a text ad that seems to be part of the blog template. I'm OK with ads being served on blogs.
