USB Flash Drives

Published by

rich

12 February 2004

“USB Speeds Explained”:http://www.kingston.com/products/MKF_530_HS2_overview.pdf. Well, I’m finally getting one for Connie. Talk about a confusing market. There are basically three standards:
* USB 1.1. This is very slow. 1Mbps
* USB 2.0 Full-speed. This is 12Mbps
* USB 2.0 Hi-speed. This is 480Mbps
Many folks are saying just USB 2.0 and making you think they will go at 480Mbps. So watch out. There is about a $7 price difference. Kingston sells a USB 2.0 256MB drive for about $67 for USB 2.0 and $74 for USB 2.0 high-speed. Kingstons are nice in that they have a 5 year warranty (of course whos going to not lose their flash drive in 5 minutes 🙂
All the drives are plus or minus $1 so right now the sweet spot pricing is (according to newegg.com):
| Capacity | Price | $/MB |
| 128MB | $45 | $0.35 |
| 256MB | $74 | $0.29 |
| 512MB | $168 | $0.33 |
| 1GB | $250 | $0.25 |
So on a cost per bit basis, the 256MB and the 1GB (surprisingly are actually cheaper. Part of that is because Kingston has a great price on 1GB right now. Other vendors are at $300.
There is also a claim that actual transfer speeds can vary. I’m confused by that, Perhaps because of flash speed or more likely interface design. There are certain USB 2.0 controllers that can’t hit 480Mbps I’ve read.
Net, net, the Kingston isn’t a bad choice and it has a key ring holder so you have a chance of not losing it 🙂

4 responses to “USB Flash Drives”

Tom Ashworth

17 September 2004

NOTE: After using the PREVIEW option below, I am not sure that the earlier part of this message went thru. If not, then please advise, and I will make up something similar to what I presented in the 1st part, especially about the AUTORUN and 1.1 speeds I was discussing.
(cont’d)
… the best I have seen is NETAXLE.COM, IGB. I need this size to have an OS on the flash drive, with room for e-mail backup, graphics that I am using more and more now, and plenty of room for temp dumps.
I can only get to this featured packed drive by going to Google, searching for usb flash drives, going to page 8, and on the left side (partners or alliances) you should see http://www.netaxle.com as the 1st entry I believe.
It looks really good to me.
Sorry about the cutoff, if it ever happened. I type too fast, and sometimes hit the enter key instead of the shift key.
Good luck, and if you have any suggestions or forwards I could link to with respect to higher speed rates for 1.1., I would be very much apppreciative of your efforts.
Thank you.
Tom Ashworth

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lol

3 April 2004

i have a 32 MB drive that I got for 18 dollars from Laxar, I don’t really have a use for that much storage space, with 1 GB you could put an operating system on it and walk around with an OS in your pocket! Most of my stuff is smaller… Does anyone know how to autorun a file on one?

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Deep Green Crystals

16 February 2004

External Hard-drive case installation
So I had these three WD 200GB IDE ATA 133 hard drives that I bought on Ebay for a song. I had them installed in an old desktop case running as RAID0 doing back-up for my LAN. But the old…

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Deep Green Crystals

16 February 2004

External Hard-drive case installation
So I had these three WD 200GB IDE ATA 133 hard drives that I bought on Ebay for a song. I had them installed in an old desktop case running as RAID0 doing back-up for my LAN. But the old…

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