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I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like
by mk_stjames 4y ago
I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI mean to add, the article says that thumb drives are still hot and the market will grow by billions a year more in a few years, but... I haven't used a thumb drive in years. The only time I actually went to look for one was to plug it into a shitty digital picture frame, and that one would also accept SD cards.
- brnt 4y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a man with a USB drive hurtling down the stairs.
- bayindirh 4y agoI still use the higher end ones (which have a USB SATA controller and a bona fide SSD) to carry photos and big files around when I'm on vacation. They look like bulky, yet ordinary USB flash drives.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, online file sharing sites of various types (dropbox, box, google drive) have basically replaced the USB stick in most cases. It's simpler to upload and send someone a link than find the stick.
- narag 4y agoFunny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop. 20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
- Raed667 4y agoOh I remember the era of giving your thumb drives all possible viruses every time you needed to print. I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.
- wil421 4y agoNewer photo booths connect to your device using a WiFi hotspot to transfer your photos. Last time all I did was scan a QR code that basically connected to a WiFi network and opened a Kodak page served by the booth.
- cute_boi 4y agolast time I had to print passport they were asking me to send email. This is such a ridiculous thing to be honest from the privacy point of view.
- Raed667 4y agoPretty sure if they want to keep a copy of your passport then they can make one when you give them a USB as well.
- mypetocean 4y agoI still make it a point to disable AutoPlay and AutoRun on every PC I possess. No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
- pdntspa 4y agoYou can always tell the DJ at the party because they are wearing headphones and a USB drive on their neck Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago"Sorry the audio buffered and cut out there, apparently the guest wifi and my cellular backup are both congested. If y'all would set your phones to airplane mode we might be able to get better audio quality..."
- pdntspa 4y agoYeah I really wanna see someone try that kind of bullshit at some big event out in the middle of the desert
- Kye 4y agoIf I were a DJ, I wouldn't want to trust the club's wifi for loading stuff.
- balderdash 4y agoI rarely use them but still see them used a fair amount being overnighted/couriered as a fail safe/easy way to share large amounts of data.
- Kye 4y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
- cbm-vic-20 4y agoAmazon has a dedicated shipping container service for moving large amounts of data into / out of AWS. Anyone ever seen/used one of these? https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
- andylynch 4y agoThis recent report from Ukraine is quite impressive: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ukraine-awards-microsoft-and-aws-peace-prize-for-cloud-services-digital-support/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ukraine-awards-mi...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 4y agoIt's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them, except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them). If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
- wildzzz 4y agoI've still got a brand new box of floppies in my desk as we've still got test equipment that has floppy drives. The equipment is still top notch and modifying it to swap in a USB floppy emulator will ruin the calibration so I just keep my USB floppy drive and a well used floppy in my bag. Despite the outdated media format, our equipment is future proof. The files and formats they all use are plain text files with a somewhat standardized data format along with PNG or GIF image formats. In addition, the equipment all have GPIB interfaces which are kind of a pain to use but they all use the same API and there's a very good chance you can swap two boxes decades apart and still use the same commands to get the same measurements. When I started my career, I was a little upset at being given such outdated looking equipment (1990s desktop white, floppy drives, AT keyboard connectors, 10base2 Ethernet!) but shortly realized that care was taken to ensure that no matter how old the equipment looks, data can still be pulled into a modern computer in file formats that will never be outdated.
- tracker1 4y agoBy the late 00's you were as likely to have a Zip drive for smaller (100mb) exchanges... if it weren't for the excessive licensing fees for the disks, the fate of the devices might have been a lot different. I really didn't consider thumb drives worth my time until they started getting over 256mb or so, I think it was also after USB3 was a thing, but it's a bit muddied in my memory.
- goosedragons 4y agoNot everybody had a Zip drive and having to transport the entire drive added a lot of bulk. By the time USB 3 hit the scene we were well beyond 256mb. The original iPod Shuffle was basically a USB 2.0 512MB flash drive with an MP3 player bolted on and that was $100 in 2005. I think by then 256MB was probably under $50.
- cm2187 4y agoStill useful to install OS on physical machines.
- tracker1 4y agoIt's probably a good 75% of what I use thumb drives for.
- willnonya 4y agoFor years I've only used them for OS installs on personal machines. At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...
- PinguTS 4y agoIt is still today the fastest way to move large amount of data around. If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20 min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps, then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25 Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail a thumb drive faster.
- rav 4y agoIn my experience, it can be faster to figure out how to plug two computers together with a direct Ethernet cable and set up static networking and run netcat or a Python simple HTTP server to transfer such large amounts of data, than it is to copy it onto the crappy slow USB thumb drive that I have in my keychain. Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb drive!
- tracker1 4y agoDepends strongly on the drive, with a lot of variance, and seedy vendors. You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4) connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way restricting traffic, etc. With most computers, the front ports may or may not be the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older device/interface, etc. I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3 umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess. All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally much faster depending on the port used.
- NavinF 4y ago10gbps and 20gbps USB M.2 enclosures are dirt cheap. I use one (with a 1TB SSD inside) as a flash drive. You can also buy USB SSDs that are smaller than M.2 enclosures but have the full SSD feature set (SMART data, TRIM, etc) just like enclosures. It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most use cases.
- davchana 4y agoRecently I have been using it to print color printouts from Staples self service. They have an email to printer option too, but sometimes the files are too big for email, and I don't want to keep deleting them from my sent emails folders. My car has a usb drive with my favorite music.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoTry getting screenshots or other media off a PS5.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoI have one on my keychain I can use in a pinch to move files somewhere. It's come in handy a few times, but generally I prefer sending a link or such. But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal. Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a big deal for people in the very poor countryside. That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
- layer8 4y agoA widespread use case is firmware upgrades for various hardware.
- wkjagt 4y agoI actually went through this yesterday! I opened a new (still in plastic!) box of HD “floppies” to make a bootable disk for my 486. I sent a picture of it to a friend and he replied “how big are these? 512k?”. I too thought it was common knowledge, the number 1.44 burned into my brain forever, but I do give my friend credit for being at least in the right ballpark, and also to come up with another number that has geek value.
- richardhod 4y agoAlso a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so. I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us
- Ekaros 4y agoFor PC I remember the 5.25" were 1.2MB. Not actually bad capacity comparatively. Or 612KB for single sided. Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at 512KB.
- jaclaz 4y agoActually 5.25" were usually 360 KB, the 1.2MB came later, just like 3.5" floppies, they were originally 360 Kb, then 720KB, only later they became 1.44MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance_and_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance... Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).
- function_seven 4y agoFor all the complaining I do about USB's naming standards—"Full Speed" is not in fact "full", it's slower than "High Speed"—I don't remember having the same gripes about Double Density vs. High Density :)
- cm2187 4y agoThen count the number of years between your birth and now vs your birth and ww2!
- function_seven 4y agoI can't stop myself from doing this all the time with music. I'll constantly realize things like, "Smells Like Teen Spirit is older today than Sgt. Pepper was when Nevermind was released." My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the oldies station, and how that music was ancient! And here I am with an understanding that—to them, listening at that time—the music was just "a few years ago".
- antiterra 4y agoExcept they (rarely) held up to 2.88MB. I think an article about removable storage would have been written similarly two decades ago. People do forget things or didn’t take note of them at the time. For example, I remember a lot of things about the Commodore 64, but I don’t remember the capacity in bytes or blocks of its floppies. Also, I sort of remember that Amiga floppies were 880k after formatting, but I had to look it up just now to confirm.
- ridgered4 4y agoI've only ever seen a IBM PC/2 with a 2.88MB drive, never actually saw a disk though. I remember seeing something about floppies and how the technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the circumference was larger) never was implemented. I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.
- aidenn0 4y agoThe LS-240 could format them to hold up to 32MB.