[HN Gopher] Who invented the thumb drive?
___________________________________________________________________
Who invented the thumb drive?
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 144 points
Date : 2022-12-12 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| mkuan wrote:
| Netac still holds patent globally until 2019. Other manufacturers
| paid Netac more than 2 billions over these years.
|
| _Made in China_ has changed a lot of things. It doesn 't matter
| who really invented thumb drives. I think the first mass
| production/sale of thumb drives happened in China. That's the
| reason the patent was granted to Netac.
| vkoskiv wrote:
| I am the proud owner of an 8MB IBM branded DiskOnKey flash drive.
| Plugging it into my linux system, it throws a lot of errors, but
| I do have a ext2 filesystem on it. I can mount it and find the
| little 'hello world' text file I put in there last June :)
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 8 MB..and here I'm sitting, filling a whopping 1 TB USB-storage
| with ISO-files for live-system, most probably bigger than a
| whole PC had available, at the time DiskOnKey was sold. That
| was just 20 Years ago. It's those little things which reminds
| me of how insanely fast technology moved in my lifetime. Who
| knows where we will be in 20 years...
| penguin_booze wrote:
| If someone in ieee publishing is reading this: please stop
| ambushing the reader with that popup.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| > global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed
| $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10
| billion by 2028.
|
| More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I
| often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.
|
| Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format
| or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very
| popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16474735
| Arrath wrote:
| My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use
| to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow
| controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an
| interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file
| onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds.
|
| Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC
| takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.
|
| The quality of these things has really gone down as they've
| gotten commoditized, it seems.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'd give it about a 1% chance that it's actually bad flash
| drives, and a 99% chance it's Sophos.
| Arrath wrote:
| Fair. It also loves to do full system scans at the worst
| time and send my fans to full throttle.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-
| format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not
| very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way
| around?
|
| Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those
| prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g.
| Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's
| fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe
| under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress
| support on their recent models of higher priced camera
| systems). Prices _are_ very high, but that 's justifiable IMO -
| unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-
| binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the
| best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up
| with the performance and endurance that professional equipment
| demands.
|
| [0]
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicursam...
|
| [1]
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicmulti...
| wongarsu wrote:
| There is more than a 10x price difference between slow run-of-
| the-mill sd cards and the high speed cards a photographer might
| go for. Why would it be any different for thumb drives? Higher
| speeds are more difficult to achieve and make up a small
| fraction of the total demand. And to make it worse people who
| _need_ speed tend to be less price sensitive.
| epicide wrote:
| I ran into this sort of issue with the Steam Deck, too.
| Initially ordered a slower-but-still-recommended cheaper SD
| card. Figured I could deal with the slower write speeds as
| that should just mean slower downloads.
|
| I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always
| confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the
| main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.
|
| Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but _every_ part
| of the experience saw a _dramatic_ improvement after I
| switched to a higher-spec SD card.
| porkbeer wrote:
| CrypticShift wrote:
| > 10x price difference ... Why would it be any different for
| thumb drives?
|
| I'm more concerned with the reliability (in my experience).
| The middle-priced ones are not necessarily better than the
| cheapest ones.
|
| > Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve
|
| I'm not asking for 1000 MB/s write speed. Why do I still
| sometimes get 10MB/s in 2023? Is it much to expect around 100
| MB/s write (HDD-level speeds) in most "average" thumb-drive?
| bluGill wrote:
| Some are much better than others. Where I work we have some
| embedded systems in lab that can only program from USB. We are
| constantly reprogramming them, so we go through a lot of USB
| drives. The cheap ones last maybe a week in the lab, we have
| found one that will last for months - they cost 5 times as
| much, but last at least 20 times longer.
| Neil44 wrote:
| The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked
| on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made
| them appear magic.
|
| People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were
| than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip
| disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer
| didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users
| where I worked at the time.
| jarenmf wrote:
| They were really a big deal. For the first time there was
| convenient way for people to share music, books, or videos. I
| remember everyone in college had their USB drive on them all
| the time and would just casually exchange media before everyone
| had access to high speed Internet.
| asvitkine wrote:
| To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| I remember loading some of my old floppies about 10 years
| ago, maybe as a bit of a nostalgia trip. I believe I'd kept
| my floppy drive around that long but probably hadn't actually
| used it in 10 years. Although I was a pretty heavy user in
| the mid 90s I was kind of kind of shocked how brutally slow
| and loud the copying operation was, and I didn't have
| memories of either of those aspects being great!
|
| There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when
| they the disk snaps in though.
| delecti wrote:
| They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience
| isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky,
| and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember
| a USB drive ever dying. I lost _lots_ of files on floppies.
| rocqua wrote:
| So many floppies were damaged by magnets that almost all
| people still remember "magnets and floppies do not mix".
| That was a hard-learned lesson for many people.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've had lots of USB flash drives fail but usually in a
| context where they experienced a high number of writes
| which makes some sense.
|
| Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of
| the cheap tradeshow variety.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter
| years. Things got progressively worse going from 51/4" ~170K
| single-sided CBM-1541 to 51/4" 360K double-sided to 51/4"
| 1.2M to 31/2" 720 to 31/2" 1.44M. I never really used 8"
| floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether
| those were better or worse than their 51/4" successors but
| the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the
| latter years of the 31/2" period.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Out of curiosity, your comment made me fire up the C64 and
| 1541 I keep as a conversation starter in my office. It
| still loads the, uh, evaluation copy of Defender of the
| Crown which 1988 me copied onto a 3M DS,DD floppy in
| February of that year, if the scrawny handwriting on the
| label is to be believed.
|
| (I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger
| colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is
| now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them
| much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in
| the mid-eighties...)
|
| So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy
| from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more
| than a third of a century later!
| bombolo wrote:
| > The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just
| worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing
| around. It made them appear magic.
|
| Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not
| just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it
| wherever I went.
| giaour wrote:
| When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable
| image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume
| BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a
| separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and
| run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I believe that Windows ME was the first (non NT based)
| windows with out-of-the-box support for USB MSC, though 98
| probably got it in a service pack at some point to support
| it. Certainly in 1999 there was a good chance that a USB
| stick would not work in a computer. By the time XP was
| common, USB sticks worked everywhere.
| bombolo wrote:
| Late windows 95/early windows 98 was my first computer with
| a single usb port and no drivers for usb memories.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/949/
| egberts1 wrote:
| To upgrade an old saying:
|
| Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck
| carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway
| from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
|
| Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite
| laser LAN.
| kevinmhickey wrote:
| Thumb drives in a truck offer great bandwidth but terrible
| latency.
| porkbeer wrote:
| nso wrote:
| Not necessarily the most practical if you include
| write/read time
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Not everything needs to have Musks companies shoehorned in.
| amelius wrote:
| Someone not smart enough to understand that most people want to
| write on it with a pen, so it should contain a large flat,
| bright-colored surface.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I guess manufacturers assumed people will first and foremost
| use them to move data around, not to backup/archive it, which
| makes sense as they were somewhat pricey initially, while the
| role of "write once, read many" was occupied by CD-R discs.
|
| Of course, at some point the prices dropped, and eventually
| some people ended up owning a dozen USB sticks of various sizes
| and shapes, some of which used for archiving, but none of them
| labeled.
| jaclaz wrote:
| To be fair, there were some USB sticks (that did not have
| much success) by PNY that had a (clever) open/close mechanism
| that made it into a rectangular shape with a paper label on
| one side where you could write (only 2 lines).
|
| The case/mechanism was similar to this:
|
| https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-6bkt1ygjlf/images/stencil/60.
| ..
|
| but they were sold in boxes of 10 or 12, I cannot remember if
| they were 1 or 2 GB capacity.
|
| EDIT:
|
| found an actual picture of them:
|
| http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/wp-content/gallery/pny-
| third-...
|
| they were 2 and 4 GB.
| hakfoo wrote:
| Underrated point here. Floppies at least usually came with
| sticky labels so you could tell them apart.
|
| With flash drives, If you're lucky, you get a colour assortment
| in the box.
|
| I bought a packet of 5x16Gb drives, and I can't tell which ones
| are the "partitioned strange for use with a vintage machine"
| versus "my brother's backups".
| porkbeer wrote:
| jk_i_am_a_robot wrote:
| I assumed it was invented when a developer cut down an edge
| connector breadboard and shoved it directly into the USB port
| then et voila it's a development board.
| bluedino wrote:
| I have the same problem I did back when a 64MB drive was the hot
| thing - how do I know I'm buying a quality drive?
|
| Even between the same brand, one drive can be great, the other is
| slower than dirt (even with USB 3), is unreliable, etc.
| ufmace wrote:
| The strange thing about the thumb drive world - I can remember
| getting my first one in the early 2000s, capacity of 4MB or so I
| think. The odd part is I have no clue what brand it was, where I
| got it from, or how I heard that they existed. I vaguely recall
| it being some no-name vaguely sketchy seeming thing. But it
| worked great.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > The Iomega Zip Drive, called a "superfloppy" drive and
| introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was
| writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due
| to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.
|
| I've heard or read a few stories about the Zip Drive recently and
| they all seem to compress the 10ish years of existence and
| completely downplay it's impact or significance.
|
| In 1994 a 1 GB SCSI drive cost over $1000 the largest IDE drives
| were about 250 MB, new PCs were shipping with 130 MB drives and
| 486 CPUs. If you need more than 1.44 MB of removable storage you
| chose between a tape backup and the rarer more expensive Bernolli
| drives; both requiring a SCSI interface. Tape drives were
| relatively inexpensive, slow and didn't do random access; reading
| or wring everything serially and it took hours to restore files.
| Bernolli drives were expensive and unreliable; the fail state was
| a damaged drive head.
|
| I remember having an Irwin 40 MB tape drive that I used to backup
| games from my 100 MB Western Digital HDD. While tape was slow, it
| was still faster than installing Wing Commander or Papyrus Nascar
| Racing from 2 dozen floppy disks. It was also unattended unlike
| floppy.
|
| When the Zip Drive arrived in 1994 it offered 100 MB of external
| storage in similar capacities to comparably priced tape drives
| for similar prices. It was random access like a floppy disk and
| you could read off of it rather than having to copy the files to
| your HDD like with Tape. It was also much faster and the parallel
| port version could be hot swapped without rebooting.
|
| CD-Rs wouldn't be a thing for a couple years, they wouldn't be
| affordable for a couple more, and they wouldn't be reliable for a
| couple more. Initial drives didn't come with buffers and needed
| high performance machines, later buffered drives could still
| underflow if your PC couldn't keep the buffer filled. Burning
| disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything
| running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt
| the burning process. Everyone had a spindle of failed burns. Even
| when CD-Rs and CD-RWs finally arrived, they were slow. The ZIP
| drive was comparable to an 8x CD-ROM and those speeds for R/RW
| were still years away.
|
| For a 6 year period after the initial 100 MB drive launched, the
| Zip drive was a big deal. I don't know what their definition of
| "widespread popularity" was but Iomega was huge for a time and
| quietly died off in the early 2000s.
|
| When Iomega launched the Zip 250 in 1999, ZDNet wrote [0]:
|
| > "...Iomega is poised to expand its already massive share of the
| removable storage market."
|
| > "The biggest name in removable storage just got bigger thanks
| to the Zip drive's increased capacity--it now holds a generous
| 250MB of data."
|
| The 750 MB version wouldn't arrive until 2002 as a last dying
| gasp from Iomega in an attempt to compete with CD-R/RW.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20001119014500/http://www8.zdnet...
| slt2021 wrote:
| right around that time I remember, I was carrying 2GB HDD as a
| removable thumb drive - to exchange music/apps with friends.
|
| Exciting times, when I prepared a careful and curated directory
| of music and apps to share with my friends and connecting drive
| via HDD could be possible even online, while PC was running.
| unilynx wrote:
| > Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown
| anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing
| would interrupt the burning process.
|
| "You think that's bad?" We had to literally watch the burn
| process. Walk away and it would fail.
|
| Took a while to realise it was the vibrations of the wooden
| floor that would kill the burn process if you didn't sneak
| away very carefully..
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Walk away and it would fail.
|
| I haven't heard that one. Did you have one of those HP CD
| Writers with purple button and no buffer too?
| unilynx wrote:
| Can't remember the brand, but it certainly wasn't
| buffered. And probably (relatively) cheap.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Am I the only one bothered that IEEE isn't GDPR compliant? They
| only give you the option to accept cookies and that's it.
| swores wrote:
| Maybe they're not tracking any personal data? The ePrivacy
| Directive ("cookies law") is years older than GDPR and only
| requires notification not consent.
|
| Sites which choose to store zero PD (which includes e.g. not
| logging IP addresses) are GDPR compliant automatically, but
| still need to notify about cookies if using them.
|
| edit: though, having looked at their privacy policy it seems
| they do use PD... so yeah, not good (unless I'm
| misunderstanding their tracking policy which I don't think I
| am) https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html
| paul7986 wrote:
| In 2015 on a reality TV show about inventors (Americas Greatest
| Maker created by Intel and Mark Burnett) I pitched two phones
| sharing battery power (reverse wireless charging).
|
| In 2018 Huwaeii was the first to introduce into the market via
| their Mate 20 Pro. Samsung added it a year later in a Galaxy
| Phone calling it "Wireless PowerShare." Their been rumors Apple
| will add it too.
|
| I've always wondered if my pitch on that TV show to Mark
| Burnett(creator of the voice, survivor, shark tank, etc) & Intel
| was the spark for it all or they'd been working on it prior. I
| would hope Intel created some patents around it as overall it was
| just idea I pitched on recorded video for the show to Mark and
| folks at Intel.
|
| I'm not a mechanical or battery engineer rather a web developer.
| Would be cool to see if my idea (was at a tech event & phone died
| yet was surrounded by tons of powered up devices) was the first
| that sparked reverse wireless charging.
| bergie wrote:
| There are thumb drives, and then there are index finger drives
| https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/when_reality_meets_product_concep...
| rvba wrote:
| In 2022, can Windows (or Linux?) defend themselves against an USB
| drive that contains a virus?
|
| If you go to some service that offers prints and use your usb
| drive there, Im like 100% sure you will get multiple viruses.
|
| I dont understand why the operating systems dont seem to be able
| to defend themselves against it. Also in the past the drives had
| a "read only" mode, nowadays this is hard to find.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read
| that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious
| since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high
| density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh
| god some people don't know that."
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean to add, the article says that thumb drives are still hot
| and the market will grow by billions a year more in a few
| years, but... I haven't used a thumb drive in years. The only
| time I actually went to look for one was to plug it into a
| shitty digital picture frame, and that one would also accept SD
| cards.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them,
| except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has
| (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them).
|
| If our computers were actually able to connect with each
| other, we would be using phones for everything already. But
| they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not
| obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I've still got a brand new box of floppies in my desk as
| we've still got test equipment that has floppy drives. The
| equipment is still top notch and modifying it to swap in a
| USB floppy emulator will ruin the calibration so I just
| keep my USB floppy drive and a well used floppy in my bag.
| Despite the outdated media format, our equipment is future
| proof. The files and formats they all use are plain text
| files with a somewhat standardized data format along with
| PNG or GIF image formats. In addition, the equipment all
| have GPIB interfaces which are kind of a pain to use but
| they all use the same API and there's a very good chance
| you can swap two boxes decades apart and still use the same
| commands to get the same measurements. When I started my
| career, I was a little upset at being given such outdated
| looking equipment (1990s desktop white, floppy drives, AT
| keyboard connectors, 10base2 Ethernet!) but shortly
| realized that care was taken to ensure that no matter how
| old the equipment looks, data can still be pulled into a
| modern computer in file formats that will never be
| outdated.
| tracker1 wrote:
| By the late 00's you were as likely to have a Zip drive for
| smaller (100mb) exchanges... if it weren't for the
| excessive licensing fees for the disks, the fate of the
| devices might have been a lot different. I really didn't
| consider thumb drives worth my time until they started
| getting over 256mb or so, I think it was also after USB3
| was a thing, but it's a bit muddied in my memory.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Not everybody had a Zip drive and having to transport the
| entire drive added a lot of bulk. By the time USB 3 hit
| the scene we were well beyond 256mb. The original iPod
| Shuffle was basically a USB 2.0 512MB flash drive with an
| MP3 player bolted on and that was $100 in 2005. I think
| by then 256MB was probably under $50.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, man. Any place you may want to bring that zip disk
| was already clicking, and you were just lucky that you
| listened it destroy somebody's else disk before you put
| yours on.
|
| The way to share data was CD-ROM. Everybody had one or
| two rewritable disks with random stuff on them. But you
| could use neither the zips nor the CDs for some stuff.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I still use the higher end ones (which have a USB SATA
| controller and a bona fide SSD) to carry photos and big files
| around when I'm on vacation. They look like bulky, yet
| ordinary USB flash drives.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Try getting screenshots or other media off a PS5.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I have one on my keychain I can use in a pinch to move files
| somewhere. It's come in handy a few times, but generally I
| prefer sending a link or such.
|
| But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal.
| Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly
| off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs
| the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of
| music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise
| you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a
| big deal for people in the very poor countryside.
|
| That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine
| it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
| PinguTS wrote:
| It is still today the fastest way to move large amount of
| data around.
|
| If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20
| min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps,
| then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25
| Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail
| a thumb drive faster.
| salawat wrote:
| Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full
| of (tapes/thumb drives/sdcards) hurtling down the highway.
|
| Sometimes, it's just easier to SneakerNet that chongus mass
| of "the most important data ever".
| rav wrote:
| In my experience, it can be faster to figure out how to
| plug two computers together with a direct Ethernet cable
| and set up static networking and run netcat or a Python
| simple HTTP server to transfer such large amounts of data,
| than it is to copy it onto the crappy slow USB thumb drive
| that I have in my keychain.
|
| Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer
| to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is
| getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be
| quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen
| to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to
| sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb
| drive!
| NavinF wrote:
| 10gbps and 20gbps USB M.2 enclosures are dirt cheap. I
| use one (with a 1TB SSD inside) as a flash drive. You can
| also buy USB SSDs that are smaller than M.2 enclosures
| but have the full SSD feature set (SMART data, TRIM, etc)
| just like enclosures.
|
| It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do
| 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most
| use cases.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Depends strongly on the drive, with a lot of variance,
| and seedy vendors.
|
| You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question
| is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4)
| connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way
| restricting traffic, etc.
|
| With most computers, the front ports may or may not be
| the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C
| connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow
| ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older
| device/interface, etc.
|
| I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on
| labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the
| "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3
| umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess.
|
| All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at
| least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally
| much faster depending on the port used.
| layer8 wrote:
| A widespread use case is firmware upgrades for various
| hardware.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Still useful to install OS on physical machines.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It's probably a good 75% of what I use thumb drives for.
| pdntspa wrote:
| You can always tell the DJ at the party because they are
| wearing headphones and a USB drive on their neck
|
| Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I
| hope it doesn't take
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| "Sorry the audio buffered and cut out there, apparently the
| guest wifi and my cellular backup are both congested. If
| y'all would set your phones to airplane mode we might be
| able to get better audio quality..."
| pdntspa wrote:
| Yeah I really wanna see someone try that kind of bullshit
| at some big event out in the middle of the desert
| Kye wrote:
| If I were a DJ, I wouldn't want to trust the club's wifi
| for loading stuff.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, online file sharing sites of various types (dropbox,
| box, google drive) have basically replaced the USB stick in
| most cases. It's simpler to upload and send someone a link
| than find the stick.
| balderdash wrote:
| I rarely use them but still see them used a fair amount being
| overnighted/couriered as a fail safe/easy way to share large
| amounts of data.
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full
| of tapes hurtling down the highway.
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Amazon has a dedicated shipping container service for
| moving large amounts of data into / out of AWS. Anyone
| ever seen/used one of these?
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
| andylynch wrote:
| This recent report from Ukraine is quite impressive:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ukraine-
| awards-mi...
| narag wrote:
| Funny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned
| twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print
| something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf
| in a _pincho_ and go down the street to the call shop.
|
| 20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than
| maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I love my laser printer. There's something about looking at
| data on paper that I really enjoy. Store it in a binder to
| look at later. Hang it on the wall to think about. I look
| at screens enough already. I don't mindlessly print stuff
| off but important stuff like soil tests etc. I'd rather
| have a physical copy than go search for it electronically.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I agree with you 100%. That's why I bought a 10" Boox
| Eink tablet last week - to read real print without
| maintaining a printer. The PDF reader the thing comes
| from supports PDF annotations, and it comes with a Wacom
| pen, so I can continue to highlight and scribble.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I'm not a particularly heavy user of paper but I
| sometimes print something out to refer to it on a call,
| print out a recipe, print out a map, etc. Paper is just
| easier sometimes and I couldn't imagine taking the 30
| minutes it would take me to go to the nearest Staples to
| get something printed out. And laser printers don't dry
| out like inkjets.
| kccqzy wrote:
| And not to mention, with some printers, you can feel the
| letters on paper as if there's some embossment. It gives
| a more tactile feel to the work you produced.
| allenu wrote:
| I bought a printer about a year ago and I use it all the
| time. There is definitely something nice and convenient
| about having a physical copy that you carry with you.
|
| I needed some info when I was playing a video game, so I
| looked it up and printed out the excerpt that I needed. I
| could have just loaded it on my phone, but then I'd have
| find the page again whenever I needed it, and try to
| avoid all the stupid ads.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Oh I remember the era of giving your thumb drives all
| possible viruses every time you needed to print.
|
| I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a
| printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only
| prints what you email them.
| wil421 wrote:
| Newer photo booths connect to your device using a WiFi
| hotspot to transfer your photos. Last time all I did was
| scan a QR code that basically connected to a WiFi network
| and opened a Kodak page served by the booth.
| cute_boi wrote:
| last time I had to print passport they were asking me to
| send email. This is such a ridiculous thing to be honest
| from the privacy point of view.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Pretty sure if they want to keep a copy of your passport
| then they can make one when you give them a USB as well.
| narag wrote:
| But even if they don't want, it's still there for GMail,
| other employees, whoever hacks their account, etc.
| Raed667 wrote:
| if that is important for you (which it should be) then
| don't use other people printers for these kind of
| documents.
| mypetocean wrote:
| I still make it a point to disable AutoPlay and AutoRun
| on every PC I possess.
|
| No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek
| and run executable code automatically on every connected
| storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Get a black and white Brother laser printer. It's super
| affordable, costs almost no money or time to maintain, and
| always works.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| Well, get an older one that does not use the chips in the
| toners. The new ones are iffy.
| davchana wrote:
| I was lucky to get laser black white printer for $49 on
| Black Friday 2020. Cartridge also costs same. HP.
| narag wrote:
| Still two orders of magnitude more expensive for my
| needs. Thank you but nope.
| ohbtvz wrote:
| > Every time I need to print something to feed some
| troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go
| down the street to the call shop.
|
| They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
| davchana wrote:
| Recently I have been using it to print color printouts from
| Staples self service. They have an email to printer option
| too, but sometimes the files are too big for email, and I
| don't want to keep deleting them from my sent emails folders.
|
| My car has a usb drive with my favorite music.
| brnt wrote:
| Never underestimate the bandwidth of a man with a USB drive
| hurtling down the stairs.
| willnonya wrote:
| For years I've only used them for OS installs on personal
| machines.
|
| At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and
| questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it
| means burning them to a CD or DVD...
| wkjagt wrote:
| I actually went through this yesterday! I opened a new (still
| in plastic!) box of HD "floppies" to make a bootable disk for
| my 486. I sent a picture of it to a friend and he replied "how
| big are these? 512k?". I too thought it was common knowledge,
| the number 1.44 burned into my brain forever, but I do give my
| friend credit for being at least in the right ballpark, and
| also to come up with another number that has geek value.
| ekianjo wrote:
| single density floppies were 720k
| porkbeer wrote:
| Pretty sure thats double density, the bigger ones were HD
| for high density. You could usually format a good floppy
| for either if the cutouts were made.
| xoxxala wrote:
| Except on a Mac, then they were 800k.
| rebolek wrote:
| And 880k on Amiga.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| There were basically never any 5.25" or 3.5" single-density
| disks on the PC, and the definition of double-density
| varied depending on disk size.
|
| 5.25" disks were 40 track, 9 sectors per track with 512
| byte sectors for 180KB per side. For 3.5" disks, the
| definition was 80 track so 360KB per side.
|
| High-density increased the number of sectors per track to
| 15 for 5.25" (600KB per side) and to 18 for 3.5" (720KB per
| side).
| narag wrote:
| The first computer I bought was a 386. But I tried the used
| machine market before, to see if it was possible to save some
| money.
|
| My father drove me to a company that had their used system
| for sale. It was embedded in a desk, the screen was
| minuscule.
|
| I don't know what impressed me more: that when I asked
| (politely, looking for a reason to walk without offending the
| seller) how much memory it had, they started counting bytes
| included in the manual, or the 8'' floppies. _Those_ were
| big.
| richardhod wrote:
| Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy
| floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area
| and actually floppy were about 512k or so.
|
| I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and
| of course it was at school, running useless software for us
| Ekaros wrote:
| For PC I remember the 5.25" were 1.2MB. Not actually bad
| capacity comparatively. Or 612KB for single sided.
|
| Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at
| 512KB.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Actually 5.25" were usually 360 KB, the 1.2MB came later,
| just like 3.5" floppies, they were originally 360 Kb,
| then 720KB, only later they became 1.44MB:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performa
| nce...
|
| Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came
| out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the
| first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for
| their capacity (which was initially inferior).
| function_seven wrote:
| For all the complaining I do about USB's naming
| standards--"Full Speed" is not in fact "full", it's
| slower than "High Speed"--I don't remember having the
| same gripes about Double Density vs. High Density :)
| jaclaz wrote:
| You skipped the time where there were punchers to open a
| second hole in 3.5 DD to make them HD (those were the
| times .... ;)):
|
| https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-
| anyone-...
| cm2187 wrote:
| Then count the number of years between your birth and now vs
| your birth and ww2!
| function_seven wrote:
| I can't stop myself from doing this all the time with music.
| I'll constantly realize things like, "Smells Like Teen Spirit
| is older today than Sgt. Pepper was when _Nevermind_ was
| released. "
|
| My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the
| oldies station, and how that music was _ancient_! And here I
| am with an understanding that--to them, listening at that
| time--the music was just "a few years ago".
| antiterra wrote:
| Except they (rarely) held up to 2.88MB.
|
| I think an article about removable storage would have been
| written similarly two decades ago. People do forget things or
| didn't take note of them at the time.
|
| For example, I remember a lot of things about the Commodore 64,
| but I don't remember the capacity in bytes or blocks of its
| floppies. Also, I sort of remember that Amiga floppies were
| 880k after formatting, but I had to look it up just now to
| confirm.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| I've only ever seen a IBM PC/2 with a 2.88MB drive, never
| actually saw a disk though.
|
| I remember seeing something about floppies and how the
| technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even
| though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked
| about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that
| just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing
| more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the
| circumference was larger) never was implemented.
|
| I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on
| multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super
| common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of
| megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like
| they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until
| flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late
| in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.
| dghughes wrote:
| The earliest I recall seeing a USB thumb drive was early 2000s
| maybe 2003. Staples then or a year later had 45MB thumb drives on
| sale I think $50). People went nuts over this deal. The cashier
| asked the elderly woman buying one if she wanted the protection
| plan for it. I probably still have the one I bought.
| rob74 wrote:
| I guess this was one of those "inventions" which are pretty
| obvious in hindsight, and I bet more than one party had already
| though of building a USB drive, it was just a question of the USB
| interface becoming widespread enough and of flash memory becoming
| affordable and reliable enough. Actually, flash memory cards with
| proprietary interfaces were available for some time before the
| year 2000 given in the article (Compact Flash since 1994, Sony's
| Memory Stick since 1998), so it was just the question of using
| USB instead of these interfaces.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That reminds me, I don't remember if it was USB 1 or 2, but at
| some point I added a card to my PC that added two USB ports. I
| think that must've been USB 2.0 because the sockets were blue
| and I'm fairly sure I could hook up my keyboard and mouse
| through USB already.
| roperj wrote:
| Blue is officially USB 3.0 - or possibly some knock off junk
| of course is always a possibility.
| russdill wrote:
| Yes, I think the use of the term "invented" as well as the idea
| that the invention was unfairly copied are a bit disingenuous.
| Credit where credit is due. Pulling together the different
| technologies and making them into a manufactural product is a
| great accomplishment. If there were inventions involved it
| would be the USB protocol, there mass storage specification,
| and of course flash memory. The thumb drive just brought those
| things together.
| chirau wrote:
| I know it is not Ajay Bhatt (he co-invented USB), but this
| reminded me of Intel's "Our rock stars are not your rock stars"
| campaign.
|
| https://youtu.be/0QYcgwjUlWo
| 2rsf wrote:
| Oh shit, another myth goes down the drain. As someone who grew up
| in Israel I was always proud of M Systems and Dov Moran as the
| inventors of the Thumb Drive and creating something nobody
| thought of before.
| [deleted]
| samanator wrote:
| The myth lives on. According to Wikipedia:
|
| > Multiple individuals have staked a claim to being the
| inventor of the USB flash drive. On April 5, 1999, Amir Ban,
| Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems, an Israeli company,
| filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a
| Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk".
| steviedotboston wrote:
| I remember buying my first thumb drive. I think it was in 2000 or
| so, and it cost $75 from Staples. It had a whopping 128mb of
| storage, which at the time felt massive. I used it for years
| until eventually it was lost.
| Doorstep2077 wrote:
| One interesting fact about thumb drives is that they have evolved
| significantly since they were first introduced. The first thumb
| drives were created in the late 1990s and were much larger and
| less reliable than the ones we use today. They were also much
| slower, with data transfer speeds of only a few megabytes per
| second. In comparison, modern thumb drives can transfer data at
| speeds of hundreds of megabytes per second and are small enough
| to fit on a keychain. This has made them an essential tool for
| many people, and they are now commonly used to store and transfer
| data for personal and professional use.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| It should also be noted that one of the reasons thumb drives took
| off when they did was not just due to USB.. as technically USB
| has been around for a few years and there were things like CF
| card readers coming on the market, and other flash storage
| readers a few years earlier.. so why did it take until later?
| Because Win 95 and Win 98 did not have plug and play drivers for
| USB mass storage devices, at all. I think it wasn't until Win98SE
| (edit: for true generic controllers it may have been Win2K even?)
| that there was a USB driver for generic thumb drives. But
| theoretically the tech was around and could have been implemented
| as early as 1996.
| myself248 wrote:
| 98SE still needed driver installation for every stick. It was
| WinME that included the first mass-storage generic class
| drivers.
|
| These were then backported to 98SE, and pretty much every
| vintagecomputing enthusiast with a 98 box is running this
| despite the anachronism, because authenticity is just such a
| massive PITA.
|
| https://vetusware.com/download/Universal%20USB%20Mass%20Stor...
|
| In case you're in the market for such a hack. :)
| unsui wrote:
| This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that
| is surprising to me:
|
| Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one
| evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a
| complete dead-end.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It had others like System Restore.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I have fond memories of Windows ME. My family upgraded from
| 95 to ME, skipped 98
| xattt wrote:
| If you were going to install Windows ME, you might as well
| have installed Windows 2000.
| kjs3 wrote:
| While I agree Win2k was in all ways better, it wasn't
| cheap relative to ME.
| derekp7 wrote:
| Windows ME still had the same loading sequence as Windows
| 95/98. That is, DOS kernel booted and then loaded the
| Windows code. Now it is true that Windows 95 and above
| mostly bypassed DOS once it was loaded, and DOS was used
| as merely a boot loader. And Windows ME made that more
| hidden. But you could still extract a DOS version out of
| ME (open a command window, use "format /s", then copy the
| various DOS command executables from the one directory to
| the floppy). You could then use this to boot DOS, and
| type "win" or something like that to load Windows ME.
| ghaff wrote:
| Long time ago but I think, as a normal Windows 95 or
| Windows 98-using consumer, upgrading to Windows ME was
| almost certainly easier and less disruptive. In spite of
| the criticism it got at the time, Windows ME worked fine
| for most people.
|
| I had some involvement with Windows 2000 from a
| professional product perspective--was even at the launch
| event--but don't think I ever seriously ran it as a
| desktop OS.
| asveikau wrote:
| Even the worst versions of windows has engineers working on
| low level iterative improvements, far detached from the
| product level people who are fucking up the big picture.
| unixhero wrote:
| Great site. Thanks for providing it
| namdnay wrote:
| "Universal" USB stick support came slightly earlier, with 2k.
| I distinctly remember it being a game-changer
| cedilla wrote:
| So, did usb sticks come with floppy disks or CDs with a
| driver?
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it may have been a mix. There was also a mini CD
| thing around that time that sometimes got used for drivers.
| In general, things were switching over to CDs in the late
| 90s but as I recall floppies were still around for some
| purposes.
|
| ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes
| downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet
| access was pretty common by then.
| Breza wrote:
| I'd forgotten about those mini-CDs. Part of the unboxing
| process was making sure you didn't scratch the driver
| disk.
| themadturk wrote:
| I got a mini-CD the other day with drivers for a new
| USB-C Ethernet dongle. I almost laughed out loud. I have
| a couple of external CD/DVD/BluRay drives around. But
| it's been a long time since I had an internal CD drive.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Where do you put the coffee mug down?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Sometimes. I recall early thumb drives didn't come in the
| small blister packs you see by cash registers today. If
| they didn't come with a CD (or miniCD) you had to go the
| the manufacturer's site and download the drivers.
| jasode wrote:
| _> But theoretically the tech was around and could have been
| implemented as early as 1996._
|
| The USB physical form-factor and electrical signals were 1996
| but the _protocol for storage devices_ appears to be later in
| 1998:
|
| Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification Overview
| V1.0 Revision October 22, 1998 :
| https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/usbmassover_10.pdf
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification
|
| Back in the day, some of my friends called thumbdrives _MSDs_
| , because when you plugged one in, Windows would show a popup
| telling you that it found a new USB _Mass Storage Device_. I
| don 't recall that initialism catching on with anybody.
| jabbany wrote:
| Hmm, I remember still having to install individual drivers for
| USB thumb drives/sticks on our stock 98SE install. It was only
| until we "upgraded" to WinME that USB mass storage largely
| became plug-and-play.
|
| (Though, I think you could grab the winme usb drivers and plop
| them into a 98 install to get universal-ish usb mass storage,
| and later drives just ended up bundling a generic driver
| instead of a device specific one on the driver CD)
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I remember that and I also remember as well some thumb drives
| that went ahead an emulated a CD-ROM drive in another
| partition with the driver installer.
|
| After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other
| partition.
| anthk wrote:
| Android Phones do that today over Mass Storage...
| brightball wrote:
| I still remember the first time I ever saw a thumb drive
| because it was in a spy movie, The Recruit. Immediately went
| looking for where I could find one.
| shagie wrote:
| I've got an early generation portable USB drive that I've kept
| for some nostalgia.
|
| https://imgur.com/2XcXCPe - its 128 MB.
|
| I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange
| which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had
| a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB.
|
| I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a
| file around sneaker net. You'll note that the USB plug is on a
| short cord - the places where I had to plug it in didn't always
| allow for easily inserting a short rectangular stick - they
| either stuck out too far for where the computer was or required
| moving other things out of the way. This one let me plug it in
| with minimal obstruction to other things in a cluttered USB port
| area.
| [deleted]
| somrand0 wrote:
| unsung? not anymore. this article is singing for him
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still
| buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while,
| because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are
| likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that
| advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more
| expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.
|
| In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some
| files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very
| rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD
| drive.
|
| EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks
| I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was
| that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable
| drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.
|
| ----
|
| [0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting
| I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or
| even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB
| stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the
| first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into
| false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's
| over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to
| _read back_ the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days
| later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still
| beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones
| forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever
| way to make money".
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| They've been popular around here for listening to music in your
| car for a very long time. Modern cars usually accept USB sticks
| as is, but there aren't many modern cars here since we're
| mostly using 10-15 year old leftovers from more developed
| countries. So people have been using cheap Chinese USB-to-AM-
| radio converters like this one:
|
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771224597.html
|
| (first result on aliexpress, I have no idea if it's any good or
| not)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oh, I forgot about those. People still use those where I live
| (Poland), though Bluetooth streaming is becoming more
| popular. But it doesn't mean they're necessarily buying _new_
| sticks - 10 year old ones work just fine.
|
| Or, some do as I do, and just play music straight from the
| phone speakers.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > Who is still buying ... SD cards?
|
| Photographers.
| knicholes wrote:
| 3D Printers
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's one application that never made sense to me. It's
| like an idea to use SD cards with paper printers - you'd
| want to connect directly with a cable, or hook it up to
| LAN/WLAN, on the first available opportunity.
|
| I get that 10 years ago, back when I was in this space,
| this was a consequence of DIY builds being Arduino-based -
| SD cards were the easiest form of durable storage to work
| with, and the alternative was _streaming_ G-code over USB,
| which tended to cause unreliable prints (my favorite
| example was a 3D printer builder and a popularizer in our
| local Hackerspace, who figured out he can 't leave a print
| job running and give the computer to his kid to play
| videogames on, because any larger load would slow G-code
| transmission rate, throw off timings, and completely ruin
| the print). But I would think these days the printers would
| be built with some on-board buffer storage and network
| connectivity. ESP32 is a thing.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I think people don't want the printer in the same room as
| their computer. If it's noisy or you have the smell of
| melting filament, that's not a pleasant experience.
|
| Network-attached might work, but that probably
| complicates the device UI substantially-- some way to
| bind it to a WLAN, possibly even set up non-DHCP network
| configuration.
| Fwirt wrote:
| There's an existing package - OctoPrint - that you
| install on a Raspberry Pi and connect up to your 3D
| printer that can provide a web interface for just about
| any 3D printer on the market, so you don't have to
| shuffle files around on SD cards or stream G-code from
| your local machine. They provide a disk image that you
| can flash so it's more or less plug-and-play. Still need
| an SD card for the Raspberry Pi though. :)
| [deleted]
| MarioMan wrote:
| > I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are
| likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that
| advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more
| expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.
|
| You can validate flash media with f3[1] on Linux/Mac or H2testw
| on Windows. These tools will fill up the drive with data, then
| verify that it all reads back properly. This ensures the drive
| meets the rated capacity and doubles as a sequential read/write
| test.
|
| 1: https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
| ridgered4 wrote:
| I started buying m.2 drives instead because they've gotten
| super cheap and are almost the same size. The main reason is
| even the crappiest m.2 drive has acceptable write performance
| but many USB drives are unbearable. I bought a little m.2 dock,
| I wish the enclosures weren't all expensive.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| I don't know what you'd need a USB stick for anymore, but SD
| cards (especially microSD cards) are still useful for onboard
| storage for cameras and portable gaming devices (Nintendo
| Switch, Steam Deck).
|
| You're probably not using them to transfer files between
| desktop or laptop computers anymore, but they have their place
| with more specialized devices.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I'll buy a new one whenever I'm at Microcenter because they are
| so cheap. I don't keep any important data on them, they are
| really just for making boot disks or transferring data between
| non-networked machines. I've got this one USB 3.0 flashdrive
| that I've have for years that for some reason I've yet to lose.
| The 3.0 interface is busted but the 2.0 interface works fine.
| If I'm using a 3.0 port, I have to very gently insert it so
| that the 3.0 pins don't make contact. I hate that flashdrive
| but it's the only one I can seem to find when I need one asap.
| brettermeier wrote:
| How do you install a fresh copy of Windows?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's been _years_ since I 've done that. But I still keep a
| stack of USB sticks that I bought (or got as freebies from
| conferences) some 8-12 years ago, some of which have enough
| space for a Windows or Linux ISO to fit.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Create a FAT32 partition on your SSD/HDD, unpack your .iso
| there, and you should be able to boot from it. You typically
| _don 't_ have to mark it as an ESP partition. It works on
| most motherboards, but not all.
| derbOac wrote:
| I still use them regularly, and will buy one if one breaks or
| something like that. I use cloud storage most of the time but
| frankly I don't trust it completely for privacy as well as
| access reasons, and my storage needs would be pretty huge, so I
| backup files on a flash drive as a kind of second backup. I
| also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as they
| take up much more space and I don't lug them around. I can fit
| a flash drive in my coat pocket when I'm traveling, and so
| forth and so on.
|
| I guess I just like redundancy, having control over my own
| physical storage, have a sort of backup routine (cloud for
| super frequent temporary storage, flash for less frequent more
| capacity, and SDD for even less frequent even higher capacity)
| and flash drives are super portable. I tend to buy them in the
| biggest fastest format I can, and pay extra for a brand name
| from a vendor I trust.
|
| I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I
| like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and
| I'd still not want some backup for _that_.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as
| they take up much more space and I don 't lug them around. I
| can fit a flash drive in my coat pocket when I'm traveling,
| and so forth and so on._
|
| This may be a more recent development, but I was recently
| buying an external SSD for my in-laws, and current options on
| the market are ~credit card sized (though thicker) and store
| a terabyte. It's already small enough I'd worry about
| misplacing it, but also small enough it would fit in my coat
| pocket, and there surely are smaller options.
|
| I'm like you wrt. controlling my own physical storage - it's
| just repeated bad experiences with USB sticks and SD cards
| that made me reluctant to ever spend money on them ever
| again. Even with SD cards, I just reuse the few good ones I
| got some 6 years ago (there's one I use for phones, and a few
| I got sitting inside Raspberry Pis).
|
| > _I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn 't thought of that,
| but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on
| there, and I'd still not want some backup for that._
|
| Same here - if I use my phone in this role, it's strictly
| temporary, just to transfer data between machines. Space on
| the phone is precious - in my experience, no matter how much
| of it you have, it will mysteriously disappear _somewhere_
| within a year, leaving you with a phone barely capable of
| storing recent photos and few apps before it starts choking
| due to lack of space...
|
| (I say _somewhere_ because I really have no idea where - on
| my Android phones, the "storage use breakdown" in settings
| feels like it never adds up.)
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