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."
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.
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...
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 gee…
single density floppies were 720k
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.
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,…
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:
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.
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.
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,…
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.
Tesla trucks are a bad application here, even though you were conspicously careful to keep your route quite short.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 price…
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.
> 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?