Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm after a new USB stick, as my current one is a little slow and far too small (250MB).

Ideally I want it to be 2GB+ but, more importantly, I want fast read speeds. I use my current stick to store my emails (huge)/browser and a good chunk of work, so I can work from anywhere with a computer.

I'm not sure of my budget — feel free to suggest anything. I've had a brief look, but I trust you big nerds more than the nerds of unknown size on various shop sites. Not to mention the sites don't tell me how fast something is.

Cheers!

Er... Any USB2 one?
2 gig should set you back about £5.

Um... This one.

Unless you're really married to the "tiny stick" idea , consider one of the 2.5" portable HDs. 160gb would cost you £50 and be comfortably quicker than any stick.

I'm still waiting for advice about what TV to buy. I'd like to complain to the management.

Eddie Izzard.

Mind you, it's 4GB big brother is only £9.

I've experienced quite a variety of different speeds, so just going by connection isn't something I want to rely on. Cheers though, Grim...



I'd rather stick to the Stick idea, because they fit in that little coin pocket in a pair of jeans quite comfortably. I'll think about a small drive, but I'd rather go for something small and flash-based.

Nice and cheap. I think I paid about £25 for this [250MB] one a few years ago. I love how storage prices drop.

Ah, sorted. I've ordered a Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 4GB drive. Good thing I'm not paying for it.

I'd like to question the idea that accessing a magnetic HDD over a USB-IDE/SCSI/SAS/SATA interface is faster than directly accessing a solid state drive.

Where do you get these, Dudley, sir?

Also, i know it says 2.5", but how big is it when you factor in the casing, etc? As big as a sandwich? As big as a CD case? AS big as a jam jar lid?

I've got a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 4GB. I've managed to do all sorts of stupid things to it and it still works fine (it's attached to my keyring).

At work I use my mobile phone like a memory stick over Bluetooth. I've always wondered why there aren't any more storage solutions that use Bluetooth. I know it's slow and there's the power thing but the fact you don't have to plug anything in must be a plus for some sort of application.

Every usb stick I've ever owned takes fucking ages when there's multiple files, syncToying to my mp3 player or stick is hell, the hard drive shoots through them. (600MB of little text files normally).

The interface doesn't seem to be the problem here.



They're laptop hard drives in a little case.

Very roughly the whole thing is as long as my middle finger and as wide as my pinky is long

Waits for penis joke.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142577 is my one. of them.

8 cm x 12.6 cm x 1.5 cm apparently.

How are those sorts of drives in terms of shock-proofness? I didn't trust the old ones after losing masses of (fortunately backed-up) data from a small drop.

That looks great, Dudley. I'm looking or something to just bung all of my pictures on. I won't be carrying it around but small and tidy is always a boon when you are short on space, and that looks just teh tickt.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

If you're not carrying round you will get a hell of a lot for your money with a full size drive.

Disadvantage, needs mains power. Advantage, you'll get 500gb instead of 160gb for another that many mimimonies.

Really?

I didn't know they got that big

I had never heard of one the size that you are talking of, let alone larger.

Thanks, Dudley, I will have a more extensive look around

Meems - I have 2 of these

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128465

Obviously bigger units. (12.5 cm x 20.4 cm x 3.6 cm) instead of (8 x 12 x 1.5) or so and needs mains power. But so much more space for the same price.

There's video of it!

I have a 250GB external 3.5" drive (a drive I bought myself, in an IDE/SATA enclosure that I bought from Maplin)

It has 16GB of free space left.

I dropped it on the floor from chest height the other day.

It still works.

I am amazed.

It's complicated. It all comes down to exactly what flash they've used inside the stick. Some of them are very quick, and as Myp hinted, there are good reasons that a solid state drive should outperform a drive with moving parts, but that is not always the case.

I did some heavy database performance testing once on some flash based drives (Baydel Maracites) that would knock your socks off. In fact:We were the ones who showed them the Windows software RAID wasn't up to it.

They are still quite small, I could fit one of those on the shelf easy peasy. I don't think I will ever have 500GB of stuff, ever, or even 160, but I guess there is not harm in having on that is bigger than you will use, as long as it doesn't mean that they are noticably slower.

We are not supposed to believe that the girl in that video is actually at that warehouse, are we?

Eesch. I've got a 2TB external drive at home. 500GB drives are properly cheap nowadays, too.

I remember when I was impressed when it was £1 a GB, now it's like 10p.

I remember being impressed at my fathers work for having a 1Gb Drive. Which was about the size of a car.

I remember when my university finally bit the bullet and bought a Mac edit suite to replace its hulking great U-Matic system. As I recall, the hard-drive was 4GB in total, partitioned into four. The case was about the same size as my Mac Pro, and the cost of the system (which also included a 180ish Mhz Mac, Media 100 and a rather spiffy Beta-SP deck) wiped out the department's entire budget for the year.

I have handled magnetic core memory. The piece I had was about 5cm squared, weighed a few dozen grams, and stored three bytes.

When I used to repair PCs, the older chap I worked with would often amuse me with stories of him fixing hard drives when he first started.
He used to get in them.

The one I have at work sits on top of the PC fine, the one at home is indeed on a shelf. If it's not going to move often then that's the way to go, never turn down extra free space. You've also got the option that it's not THAT hard to just grab the PSU and drive to take with you.

Vote:Dudley.

Clearly the serial killer.

BTW I have an Iomega external drive which works directly off USB or firewire power. It's not tiiiny but is only slightly thicker than my iPhone if I need to take it anywhere. 250 or so gigabytes, I think.

Indeed, that's the same type as the WD one I linked, you can get them in up to 320 for more cost.

I remember visiting one of the offline editors at Granada and he was banging on about his editing system. It all slotted together in a massive metal structure and he was bragging about how he was 'one attachment away... from one... tera...byte!'

Of course at the time (2005) we were all 'ooooh!'

Heh, when I started uni, one of the lecturers said something along the lines of there being an estimated 3 terabytes in use in the entire world ever. Most of it owned by the phone companies, or something.
And honestly, it wasn't all that long ago.

A quick google reveals "They say that this number reached 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes) in 2007,"

My Nan's mind boggled once when I was taking photos of her and my grandad at their 65th anniversary a few years ago and she asked how much it cost to take so many pictures. I explained that they were stored on my SD card, and took the card out to show her. She just kept shaking her head and saying 'I don't know, I don't know, the things they can't do..."

To be honest I am still doing the same with the 2GB micro SD that I have. I keep putting it on the end of my finger and going 'cor, 'tis indeed amazing'.

I did that when I first saw Gamecube discs, though I've no idea what their capacity is.

roughly 1.5Gb

You can get a good sandisk EIGHT gig one of those for £20 delivered now.

As I said to Fellow excellent Jamesoff once, "Isn't living in the future marvellous?"

I can fit more games on a C90 than you can on your Gamecube disc. Think on.......

Probably, but sticking games on a moped is hardly fair competition.

It is amazing. When you stop and think about it, the speed at which the technology has increased is staggering.
Just look at the box allowing you to view this forum, and think about what it's actually doing... 50 years ago this would probably be called witchcraft.

Mine is witchcraft.

Or if you can't be bothered to think, just run task manager.

I sorted out a new desktop for my brother this week (Q6600, 4gb, 9600GT, 1tb HD etc etc for £800) and of course job one was to stick the crysis demo on.

Crikey.

So that's Doom plus less than half a generation of human advancement is it? I'm giving them abother 20 years to get me a holodeck otherwise they're slacking.