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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

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: "?
      - icefox 14y ago
        Because I haven't used it myself, only saw it in action at the presentation.
    - danieldk 14y ago
      I want to make snapshots right in VMWare, because it gives the additional advantage that I can quickly switch between them. E.g. I have snapshots for a clean Windows installs with a different set of development tools.
    - Stratoscope 14y ago
      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.
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.

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: "?
    - icefox 14y ago
      Because I haven't used it myself, only saw it in action at the presentation.
  - danieldk 14y ago
    I want to make snapshots right in VMWare, because it gives the additional advantage that I can quickly switch between them. E.g. I have snapshots for a clean Windows installs with a different set of development tools.
  - Stratoscope 14y ago
    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.

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.