27 ms·

A SSD in Your Pocket

264 points by vetler 14y ago

therealarmen 14y ago
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.
- oscilloscope 14y ago
  Large datasets, mostly. Datasets with 20+ columns and millions of rows can be in the 2-60GB range as plain text files, uncompressed.
- rcamera 14y ago
  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.
- RobAley 14y ago
  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.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  My machine is full of VMs that I use for testing software. It would be great if I can offload that to an SSD-in-a-pocket.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  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.
  - danieldk 14y ago
    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.
    - icefox 14y ago
      Sounds like you want bup which was made for snapshotting vm's without an all new copy being made each time: https://github.com/apenwarr/bup https://github.com/apenwarr/bup Disclaimer: Saw the guys presentation at a Git hacking session the other year and was very blown away by the tech involved, very cool stuff.
      - omaranto 14y ago
        Why did you decide to prefix the last sentence with "Disclaimer: "?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  I wonder if there's potential for a market in flash memory / USB sticks optimized for latency and throughput at the expense of capacity?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    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.
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    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).
- netcan 14y ago
  For most people it's "media" of various sorts. Some of it legal but most of the big stuff is pirated movies, shows & music.
  - ygra 14y ago
    My biggest chunk of data is around 300 GiB of photos. Since the raws are around 10–12 MiB each that adds up quickly.
  - aes256 14y ago
    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.
    - netcan 14y ago
      It is. Some people do. I think more people have a lot of pirated content. I'm not saying thumb drives should be banned, just mentioning the elephant.
- lmm 14y ago
  Modern video games can be 10GB each. 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.
  - krzyk 14y ago
    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).
    - aes256 14y ago
      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.
    - regularfry 14y ago
      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.
    - aw3c2 14y ago
      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. edit: oops, the op talked about modern games.
    - supersaiyan 14y ago
      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...
- carlesfe 14y ago
  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.
  - gambiting 14y ago
    I have the same problem. You might be interested in this: http://theniftyminidrive.com/ http://theniftyminidrive.com/ 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.
    - nicpottier 14y ago
      Ya, I love the idea of these. How do you have one already, thought they weren't shipping yet. Also a pretty sweet solution for (encrypted) backup.
      - charliepark 14y ago
        I think the original Kickstarter backers might already have theirs.
- DanBC 14y ago
  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.
  - hackmiester 14y ago
    What's difficult about partitioning a USB stick, as opposed to partitioning an HDD?
    - DanBC 14y ago
      USB sticks are removable media and thus need some kludges to get partitioning software to work. Maybe it's easier now, but it was a bit tricky in 2010.
      - ninguem2 14y ago
        fdisk will partition an USB stick or other removable media. I remember partitioning SD cards as long as 8 years ago.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  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.
  - rgbrgb 14y ago
    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.
    - mason55 14y ago
      Getting my building wired for FiOS was a godsend. 75/35 even at peak traffic hours.
- lnanek2 14y ago
  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.
- chuppo 14y ago
  "Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix" Thanks for the advertisement, salary man!
- jopt 14y ago
  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.
- jwr 14y ago
  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.
- Moto7451 14y ago
  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.
- glaze 14y ago
  I store backups on mine. I also store them on an HDD, but redundancy is the way to go with backups.
- bane 14y ago
  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.
  - grecy 14y ago
    > I would humbly suggest you rethink what the term "power user" means. You are confusing "power user" with "data hoarder".
    - bane 14y ago
      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.
      - grecy 14y ago
        Of course, your Mum also requires a car that can drive > 100 miles between fill ups. The most "power user" cars in the world, Formula One, can only go around 60 miles between fill ups. Large amounts of data doesn't make someone a power user, and lack of data doesn't make someone not a power user.
        bane 14y ago
- dripton 14y ago
  I have one in my car, with my entire music collection on it. Though I might want to delete some, since my car's interface for switching between albums is serial. Takes a long time to go from A to Z.
- thenomad 14y ago
  Whilst this isn't the common use: I'm a film director. I would very, very much like to be able to carry a backup of my life's work around on a memory stick. We're getting there. Give me 500Gb in portable form and I'll be able to do it, at least for a while. But much less than that ain't doable.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    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.
    - dholowiski 14y ago
      Just carry the bare drive, in an anti static bag. That's smaller than an iPhone.
    - thenomad 14y ago
      Heh, I like the RAID idea. I want to be able to put it in my pocket - sadly a USB enclosed SSD is too large for that.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >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. You can do the rest of the math.
barredo 14y ago
Could you buy ~4 of these and make some sort of 'RAID' to increase performance/redundancy/etc?
- ygra 14y ago
  You mean like this ZFS USB thumb drive RAID? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0
- omh 14y ago
  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.
  - doyouevenlift 14y ago
    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. I ain't even mad.
    - jopt 14y ago
      This isn't /g/
    - ersii 14y ago
      Hey, tone it down mister. 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)
rdl 14y ago
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. I personally like the SanDisk Extreme (http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-032G-AFFP/dp/B008AF383S http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-03...). Lexar Triton is also good. 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%.
- xymostech 14y ago
  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.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Measured performance around 120/80. 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).
zokier 14y ago
> ... 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.
- panacea 14y ago
  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.
- bruceboughton 14y ago
  And a right way up relative to the floor/table so that big devices can be tall not wide.
- phaker 14y ago
  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.
- username3 14y ago
  Some come with short USB extensions.
dexter313 14y ago
>>Is the 'installing device driver' and 'safe to eject' malarkey still just as slow and clunky with USB3?<< Im curious about this, anyone has any experience? Are USB 3.0 ports common now?
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  Not in my experience. It certainly adds to the cost of mobos/cases, so most pre-builds don't bother. Most people still buy pre-builds.
mtgx 14y ago
You can install Windows super fast from a USB 3.0 stick, too. It takes minutes to install the whole OS.
- ygra 14y ago
  If “minutes” ≤ “15 minutes” then the same holds true for USB 2, though. Or around 10 if installing on an SSD.
- enneff 14y ago
  It also takes "minutes" to install from DVD.
Anechoic 14y ago
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.
- james-skemp 14y ago
  I have a Patriot Xporter that's rubberized and which has lasted me for over a year on a key chain. It takes up a bit more space, but it hasn't been a bother.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Imation Ironkey are supposed to be "indestructable". Expensive, and with some questionable marketing. There are others - Corsair survivor is one. It's a good point. There've been a number of important data privacy breaches because of lost USB sticks.
- antidoh 14y ago
  My little SanDisk doesn't have a keychain loop, it has a hole built in to the body, same idea as the slot/hole built into your car key or house key.
- gambiting 14y ago
  Kingston DT Ultimate 3.0 The loop is quite big and made out of thick plastic - works for me.
- icefox 14y ago
  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.
ludovicurbain 14y ago
Gee Jeff, welcome to 2012. And by the way, that is not an SSD, it's a piece of shit usb stick with pitiful 4K numbers totally negating it's "awesome" sequential speed, which is matched by every single usb3.0 drive worth its salt. You might want to check the cruzer 3 extreme, that one seemed to have pretty decent 4k numbers although it's out of stock @ my suppliers.
NLips 14y ago
"An SSD..." / "A solid-state drive"
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  And? That's proper grammar.
- jopt 14y ago
  Elaborate.
- jkubicek 14y ago
  An ess-ess-dee / A solid-state drive
- vetler 14y ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    He's not right.
    - swift 14y ago
      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.
      - lttlrck 14y ago
        It's hardly a corner-case.
doyouevenlift 14y ago
So this guy bought a new drive but wait Stack Careers! HN is becoming the mush Reddit is.
- hdra 14y ago
  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...
- danso 14y ago
  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.
- icebraining 14y ago
  " If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    Based on his username (a meme) and one previous comment, I'd say he's perfectly aware (and intends to post it anyway).
ujdtyhf 14y ago
But how many 4KB IOPS can it do? Answer: According to http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive , 128GB version has 255 KBytes/s writes, 7 MBytes/s reads.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
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.
- Moto7451 14y ago
  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.
- reedlaw 14y ago
  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.
  - esolyt 14y ago
    > And if I did buy through an affiliate link, I would be happy that Jeff earned some money for his post. Nobody has a problem with that. I would be happy too. But if he really does earn money, the problem here would be fact that he isn't mentioning it.
  - bpatrianakos 14y ago
    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.
dysoco 14y ago
I must be the only guy that still has an old 270Gb HDD and a 4Gb USB.
ichilton 14y ago
What's he using to benchmark that? - anyone know? What's the best benchmark tool for drives and/or network shares?
- ygra 14y ago
  That's the Windows 8 Explorer copying files.
VikingCoder 14y ago
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?
- MattSayar 14y ago
  Probably still more than his old one.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
programminggeek 14y ago
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.
afterburner 14y ago
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. Check the return policy before you buy!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
GigabyteCoin 14y ago
According to newegg.ca: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007959%20600082309%20600000482&IsNodeId=1&name=128GB http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#38... The corsair usb 3.0 "voyager gt" is cheaper and faster.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  that's the 128gb model, not the 64 that jeff reviewed. Prices for the 64gb are closer, but the corsair is $7 cheaper. $10 shipping in ca? Damn.
nilsimsa 14y ago
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.
- Leftium 14y ago
  The Super Talent RC8 has a peppy SandForce SSD controller. http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-rc8-flash-drive-21182.html http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-rc...
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    Very cool, but Amazon says it's $230 for a 50 GB model! I need to run more detailed benchmarks but hopefully the 64GB for $75 model is somewhat close to "real" SSD performance on the full gamut of IO.
R_Edward 14y ago
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?
lucisferre 14y ago
This got me looking for USB 3.0 sticks. Up here in Canada our go to source is NCIX (they sell to the US as well I believe). These two deals are pretty good, both better than the Amazon price. 64GB: http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-64G-CGY&manufacture=AData%20Technology&promoid=1230 http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-... 32GB: http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GSBUSB&manufacture=Patriot&promoid=1230 http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GS... * I do not work for NCIX, just figured I'd share the love.
calgaryeng 14y ago
Why is a post about USB sticks on the front page of HN... Don't get it!
aufreak3 14y ago
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?
- cwb71 14y ago
  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.
- B-Con 14y ago
  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.
  - aufreak3 14y ago
    Thanks for the replies here. 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.
asdfqwert 14y ago
ffs... Its "AN" SSD, not "A SSD" This site should really be called GrammarHorror.com

264 points by vetler 14y ago

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.

oscilloscope 14y ago
Large datasets, mostly. Datasets with 20+ columns and millions of rows can be in the 2-60GB range as plain text files, uncompressed.
rcamera 14y ago
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.
RobAley 14y ago
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.
FooBarWidget 14y ago
My machine is full of VMs that I use for testing software. It would be great if I can offload that to an SSD-in-a-pocket.
ghshephard 14y ago
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.
- danieldk 14y ago
  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.
  - icefox 14y ago
    Sounds like you want bup which was made for snapshotting vm's without an all new copy being made each time: https://github.com/apenwarr/bup https://github.com/apenwarr/bup Disclaimer: Saw the guys presentation at a Git hacking session the other year and was very blown away by the tech involved, very cool stuff.
    - omaranto 14y ago
      Why did you decide to prefix the last sentence with "Disclaimer: "?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
JulianMorrison 14y ago
I wonder if there's potential for a market in flash memory / USB sticks optimized for latency and throughput at the expense of capacity?
- DanBC 14y ago
  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.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  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).
netcan 14y ago
For most people it's "media" of various sorts. Some of it legal but most of the big stuff is pirated movies, shows & music.
- ygra 14y ago
  My biggest chunk of data is around 300 GiB of photos. Since the raws are around 10–12 MiB each that adds up quickly.
- aes256 14y ago
  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.
  - netcan 14y ago
    It is. Some people do. I think more people have a lot of pirated content. I'm not saying thumb drives should be banned, just mentioning the elephant.
lmm 14y ago
Modern video games can be 10GB each. 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.
- krzyk 14y ago
  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).
  - aes256 14y ago
    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.
  - regularfry 14y ago
    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.
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    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. edit: oops, the op talked about modern games.
  - supersaiyan 14y ago
    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...
carlesfe 14y ago
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.
- gambiting 14y ago
  I have the same problem. You might be interested in this: http://theniftyminidrive.com/ http://theniftyminidrive.com/ 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.
  - nicpottier 14y ago
    Ya, I love the idea of these. How do you have one already, thought they weren't shipping yet. Also a pretty sweet solution for (encrypted) backup.
    - charliepark 14y ago
      I think the original Kickstarter backers might already have theirs.
DanBC 14y ago
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.
- hackmiester 14y ago
  What's difficult about partitioning a USB stick, as opposed to partitioning an HDD?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    USB sticks are removable media and thus need some kludges to get partitioning software to work. Maybe it's easier now, but it was a bit tricky in 2010.
    - ninguem2 14y ago
      fdisk will partition an USB stick or other removable media. I remember partitioning SD cards as long as 8 years ago.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
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.
- rgbrgb 14y ago
  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.
  - mason55 14y ago
    Getting my building wired for FiOS was a godsend. 75/35 even at peak traffic hours.
lnanek2 14y ago
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.
chuppo 14y ago
"Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix" Thanks for the advertisement, salary man!
jopt 14y ago
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.
jwr 14y ago
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.
Moto7451 14y ago
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.
glaze 14y ago
I store backups on mine. I also store them on an HDD, but redundancy is the way to go with backups.
bane 14y ago
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.
- grecy 14y ago
  > I would humbly suggest you rethink what the term "power user" means. You are confusing "power user" with "data hoarder".
  - bane 14y ago
    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.
    - grecy 14y ago
      Of course, your Mum also requires a car that can drive > 100 miles between fill ups. The most "power user" cars in the world, Formula One, can only go around 60 miles between fill ups. Large amounts of data doesn't make someone a power user, and lack of data doesn't make someone not a power user.
      - bane 14y ago
dripton 14y ago
I have one in my car, with my entire music collection on it. Though I might want to delete some, since my car's interface for switching between albums is serial. Takes a long time to go from A to Z.
thenomad 14y ago
Whilst this isn't the common use: I'm a film director. I would very, very much like to be able to carry a backup of my life's work around on a memory stick. We're getting there. Give me 500Gb in portable form and I'll be able to do it, at least for a while. But much less than that ain't doable.
- mistercow 14y ago
  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.
  - dholowiski 14y ago
    Just carry the bare drive, in an anti static bag. That's smaller than an iPhone.
  - thenomad 14y ago
    Heh, I like the RAID idea. I want to be able to put it in my pocket - sadly a USB enclosed SSD is too large for that.
pretoriusB 14y ago
>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. You can do the rest of the math.

barredo 14y ago

Could you buy ~4 of these and make some sort of 'RAID' to increase performance/redundancy/etc?

ygra 14y ago
You mean like this ZFS USB thumb drive RAID? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0
omh 14y ago
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.
- doyouevenlift 14y ago
  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. I ain't even mad.
  - jopt 14y ago
    This isn't /g/
  - ersii 14y ago
    Hey, tone it down mister. 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)

rdl 14y ago

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. I personally like the SanDisk Extreme (http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-032G-AFFP/dp/B008AF383S http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-03...). Lexar Triton is also good. 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%.

xymostech 14y ago
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.
- rdl 14y ago
  Measured performance around 120/80. 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).

zokier 14y ago

> ... 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.

panacea 14y ago
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.
bruceboughton 14y ago
And a right way up relative to the floor/table so that big devices can be tall not wide.
phaker 14y ago
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.
username3 14y ago
Some come with short USB extensions.

dexter313 14y ago

>>Is the 'installing device driver' and 'safe to eject' malarkey still just as slow and clunky with USB3?<< Im curious about this, anyone has any experience? Are USB 3.0 ports common now?

SquareWheel 14y ago
Not in my experience. It certainly adds to the cost of mobos/cases, so most pre-builds don't bother. Most people still buy pre-builds.

mtgx 14y ago

You can install Windows super fast from a USB 3.0 stick, too. It takes minutes to install the whole OS.

ygra 14y ago
If “minutes” ≤ “15 minutes” then the same holds true for USB 2, though. Or around 10 if installing on an SSD.
enneff 14y ago
It also takes "minutes" to install from DVD.

Anechoic 14y ago

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.

james-skemp 14y ago
I have a Patriot Xporter that's rubberized and which has lasted me for over a year on a key chain. It takes up a bit more space, but it hasn't been a bother.
DanBC 14y ago
Imation Ironkey are supposed to be "indestructable". Expensive, and with some questionable marketing. There are others - Corsair survivor is one. It's a good point. There've been a number of important data privacy breaches because of lost USB sticks.
antidoh 14y ago
My little SanDisk doesn't have a keychain loop, it has a hole built in to the body, same idea as the slot/hole built into your car key or house key.
gambiting 14y ago
Kingston DT Ultimate 3.0 The loop is quite big and made out of thick plastic - works for me.
icefox 14y ago
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.

ludovicurbain 14y ago

Gee Jeff, welcome to 2012. And by the way, that is not an SSD, it's a piece of shit usb stick with pitiful 4K numbers totally negating it's "awesome" sequential speed, which is matched by every single usb3.0 drive worth its salt. You might want to check the cruzer 3 extreme, that one seemed to have pretty decent 4k numbers although it's out of stock @ my suppliers.

NLips 14y ago

"An SSD..." / "A solid-state drive"

ceejayoz 14y ago
And? That's proper grammar.
jopt 14y ago
Elaborate.
jkubicek 14y ago
An ess-ess-dee / A solid-state drive
vetler 14y ago
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.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  He's not right.
  - swift 14y ago
    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.
    - lttlrck 14y ago
      It's hardly a corner-case.

doyouevenlift 14y ago

So this guy bought a new drive but wait Stack Careers! HN is becoming the mush Reddit is.

hdra 14y ago
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...
danso 14y ago
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.
icebraining 14y ago
" If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  Based on his username (a meme) and one previous comment, I'd say he's perfectly aware (and intends to post it anyway).

ujdtyhf 14y ago

But how many 4KB IOPS can it do? Answer: According to http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive , 128GB version has 255 KBytes/s writes, 7 MBytes/s reads.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

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.

Moto7451 14y ago
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.
reedlaw 14y ago
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.
- esolyt 14y ago
  > And if I did buy through an affiliate link, I would be happy that Jeff earned some money for his post. Nobody has a problem with that. I would be happy too. But if he really does earn money, the problem here would be fact that he isn't mentioning it.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  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.

dysoco 14y ago

I must be the only guy that still has an old 270Gb HDD and a 4Gb USB.

ichilton 14y ago

What's he using to benchmark that? - anyone know? What's the best benchmark tool for drives and/or network shares?

ygra 14y ago
That's the Windows 8 Explorer copying files.

VikingCoder 14y ago

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?

MattSayar 14y ago
Probably still more than his old one.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

programminggeek 14y ago

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.

afterburner 14y ago

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. Check the return policy before you buy!

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

GigabyteCoin 14y ago

According to newegg.ca: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007959%20600082309%20600000482&IsNodeId=1&name=128GB http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#38... The corsair usb 3.0 "voyager gt" is cheaper and faster.

mdonahoe 14y ago
that's the 128gb model, not the 64 that jeff reviewed. Prices for the 64gb are closer, but the corsair is $7 cheaper. $10 shipping in ca? Damn.

nilsimsa 14y ago

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.

Leftium 14y ago
The Super Talent RC8 has a peppy SandForce SSD controller. http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-rc8-flash-drive-21182.html http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-rc...
- codinghorror 14y ago
  Very cool, but Amazon says it's $230 for a 50 GB model! I need to run more detailed benchmarks but hopefully the 64GB for $75 model is somewhat close to "real" SSD performance on the full gamut of IO.

R_Edward 14y ago

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?

lucisferre 14y ago

This got me looking for USB 3.0 sticks. Up here in Canada our go to source is NCIX (they sell to the US as well I believe). These two deals are pretty good, both better than the Amazon price. 64GB: http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-64G-CGY&manufacture=AData%20Technology&promoid=1230 http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-... 32GB: http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GSBUSB&manufacture=Patriot&promoid=1230 http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GS... * I do not work for NCIX, just figured I'd share the love.

calgaryeng 14y ago

Why is a post about USB sticks on the front page of HN... Don't get it!

aufreak3 14y ago

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?

cwb71 14y ago
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.
B-Con 14y ago
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.
- aufreak3 14y ago
  Thanks for the replies here. 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.

asdfqwert 14y ago

ffs... Its "AN" SSD, not "A SSD" This site should really be called GrammarHorror.com