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There are also those fun thumb drives that will repeatedly bolt a couple Kilovolt into the USB port for shits and giggles. Plugging in USB is just as unsafe as

by tscs37 10y ago

There are also those fun thumb drives that will repeatedly bolt a couple Kilovolt into the USB port for shits and giggles. Plugging in USB is just as unsafe as about anything else you can use a computer for.

digi_owl 10y ago
How we ended up with an active device as our primary means of removable storage is me a puzzle...
- tscs37 10y ago
  Two Words. Legacy Hardware.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  We chose flash memory. It's a storage medium that involves a lot of tiny wires laid out in patterns going to the storage cell. We want to access these with only a few macroscopic wires connecting to a computer. This process has to be managed by a microprocessor of some sort. Would you expect the host device to know the internal layout properties and hardware limitations of a purely passive bank of flash memory (e.g. when to mark a sector as failed)? It's possible but distributing the hardware and software to do this effectively would be a very difficult problem, and industry standardisation to mitigate it would be hard to arrive at as well, and deploying advances in flash memory would be hampered (remember when people worried about 720kb/1.44mb floppies? Imagine that for each new generation of flash memory. Is your flash drive slot MLC NAND flash capable? NOR flash? TLC? HKMG?) Instead we live in a world where not just thumb drives, but even memory sticks and SD cards, are active devices. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the convenience of using one port for everything.)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    facepalm
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    There ought to be some way to make a secure data transfer interface. I guess not making it an universal bus is one of the steps for that. Also, making it either optical or magnetic should help.
  - dfox 10y ago
    SmartMedia and xD flash cards are notionally controller-less in the sense that the electrical interface is just parallel interface of NAND flash chip and all the FTL stuff is done by whatever device it's plugged into. one problem with that is that it requires all the devices to use same FTL logic with the standard one being NDA'd.

by tscs37 10y ago

digi_owl 10y ago

How we ended up with an active device as our primary means of removable storage is me a puzzle...

tscs37 10y ago
Two Words. Legacy Hardware.
fennecfoxen 10y ago
We chose flash memory. It's a storage medium that involves a lot of tiny wires laid out in patterns going to the storage cell. We want to access these with only a few macroscopic wires connecting to a computer. This process has to be managed by a microprocessor of some sort. Would you expect the host device to know the internal layout properties and hardware limitations of a purely passive bank of flash memory (e.g. when to mark a sector as failed)? It's possible but distributing the hardware and software to do this effectively would be a very difficult problem, and industry standardisation to mitigate it would be hard to arrive at as well, and deploying advances in flash memory would be hampered (remember when people worried about 720kb/1.44mb floppies? Imagine that for each new generation of flash memory. Is your flash drive slot MLC NAND flash capable? NOR flash? TLC? HKMG?) Instead we live in a world where not just thumb drives, but even memory sticks and SD cards, are active devices. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the convenience of using one port for everything.)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  facepalm
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  There ought to be some way to make a secure data transfer interface. I guess not making it an universal bus is one of the steps for that. Also, making it either optical or magnetic should help.
- dfox 10y ago
  SmartMedia and xD flash cards are notionally controller-less in the sense that the electrical interface is just parallel interface of NAND flash chip and all the FTL stuff is done by whatever device it's plugged into. one problem with that is that it requires all the devices to use same FTL logic with the standard one being NDA'd.