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.
This is a very subtle advert. So quick digging raises one interesting question: Are they being paid by Patriot?<p>Clearly they're using Amazon referral links here but that image at the bottom of the article is both professionally taken and unique to this article (I put it into Google Image search and TinyEye - neither had relevant results).<p>If they are being paid by Patriot then I would suggest it is immoral not to say that in the advert/article.
Apparently a lot of them have really horrible random read and especially random write performance. That probably doesn't matter too much for how most people use the drives (moving large files), but would make them less useful as a disk replacement.<p>I personally like the SanDisk Extreme (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-032G-AFFP/dp/B008AF383S" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-03...</a>). Lexar Triton is also good.<p>The 32GB+ ones are the only drives with enough chips to have full write speed; the 16GB drives usually don't have the full number of chips, so write speeds are 50%.
> ... it is a bit chunkier in width than my previous USB flash drive. It might be a bit more to carry, and might not fit some USB ports depending on what's adjacent.<p>I hate these, both USB devices and wallwarts that block adjacent sockets. Frankly I think that USB forum should have specified max dimensions for USB plugs/devices and matching minimum spacing for ports.
But how many 4KB IOPS can it do?<p>Answer: According to <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive" rel="nofollow">http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive</a> , 128GB version has 255 KBytes/s writes, 7 MBytes/s reads.
One huge issue I've had with USB sticks on my keychain - the stick breaking off at the keychain loop and losing the stick. I keep the important stuff on encrypted disk images and immediately change my SSH keys when I notice the stick is gone, but losing the actual stick is an inconvenience.<p>Looking at the photo of the Magnum stick, I can't imagine that stick staying attached to a keychain for more than a couple of weeks.<p>Doesn't anyone make a USB stick actually <i>designed</i> to be used on a keychain? My VW car fob has lasted 14 years so it can't be that difficult. All the sturdy models I've seen on Amazon or Newegg have horrible reviews for reliability reasons.
Just a caution that these USB flash drives tend to have good sequential performance but lousy random write performance. So for copying lots of small files the performance might still be quite low. The reason is sequential performance is easy to achieve with NAND flash and a simple controller but random performance requires a powerful controller and better algorithms.
Wait a second - as I understand it, an empty, brand new flash drive is guaranteed to outperform an empty, much used flash drive. As I understand it, the performance degrades with usage. So, what will be the performance of his fancy new drive after a similar amount of use as his old one?
According to newegg.ca: <a href="http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007959%20600082309%20600000482&IsNodeId=1&name=128GB" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&...</a><p>The corsair usb 3.0 "voyager gt" is cheaper and faster.
Is it just me or are any of you checking whether linked products are affiliate links before clicking on them? My mental estimate of the unbiased-ness of a review reduces irrespective of article author when I observe affiliate links to products. Is that inappropriate?
Best use for this IMO would be to carry around VirtualBox and some Ubuntu images to have your dev setup with you wherever you can drop in a USB system. Then again, if you just SSH into your system any place you have wifi, it's kind of the same thing 90% of the time.
Assuming the USB 3.0 works as advertised for all cases... It's probably much better than it used to be, but I've plugged in devices claiming to be "USB3.0" into my USB 3.0 slot, and gotten very pedestrian speeds.<p>Check the return policy before you buy!
This got me looking for USB 3.0 sticks. Up here in Canada our go to source is NCIX (they sell to the US as well I believe).<p>These two deals are pretty good, both better than the Amazon price.<p>64GB: <a href="http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-64G-CGY&manufacture=AData%20Technology&promoid=1230" rel="nofollow">http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-...</a><p>32GB: <a href="http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GSBUSB&manufacture=Patriot&promoid=1230" rel="nofollow">http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GS...</a><p>* I do not work for NCIX, just figured I'd share the love.
After losing all the data on a 4GB USB stick when it simply decided it was time to bite the bag, I have become more anxious about using an SSD as the boot and system drive in my home desktop machine. When I installed Win7, I relocated Users to a separate mechanical hard drive (which is backed up onto a Synology NAS RAID), and now I'm thinking of copying Program Files and Program Files (x86) to another mechanical drive. Am I being overly paranoid? or is this something I should have done from the get-go?
>>Is the 'installing device driver' and 'safe to eject' malarkey still just as slow and clunky with USB3?<<<p>Im curious about this, anyone has any experience?<p>Are USB 3.0 ports common now?