
A SSD in Your Pocket - vetler
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/a-ssd-in-your-pocket.html
======
therealarmen
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.

~~~
ghshephard
iTunes Libraries - Just a few television series subscriptions will wipe out a
256 GB disk instantly - meaning you are constantly juggling files offline. I
carry a lot of 64 GB SD cards.

My "Online Local" Aperture Vault is currently 75 GB. The EOS 7D pictures are
10MB each. I spend a _lot_ of time deleting/moving photos offline, but the CF
Flash I put in my camera is 64 GB, So just filling that one up (which I can do
in a weekend, without much trouble) would be half of my Aperture Photo
collection. Aperture has the ability to store your photos "Offline" on a
secondary storage - which is where the majority of my photos are (only
thumbnails are kept local)

I've taken some 2 GB Videos with my iPhone. Having a Video SD Card is nice.

VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly. And, you
rarely need them in your system.

256 GB is painfully small. 512 GB would be filled up quickly. I could probably
get by with 1 TB, with the 3TB Drive on my desk to shuffle off less frequently
viewed Video seasons.

The nice thing about SD/USB Flash drives is you can stick them into your
laptop, _and leave them there_ without having to futz around with a cable and
a separate spinning hard drive. Then, when you don't need the
photos/VMware/Video/TV Season - you just swap another one in.

I'd love to have a 128 GB _Fast_ USB Flash drive - those would be awesome.

~~~
krzyk
I think that this is a use case for a NAS, not for flash drive which is
designed to be mobile not to store a lot of data.

I don't even own a flash drive (my wife has few, but she needs them in school)
I have a single 1TB drive attached to my network, there I store all my data
(and rsync it to outside backup). This disk is almost full now and I'll look
into buying something bigger.

Why would I need to carry GBs of music/tv shows in my pocket? Just in case I
need to watch some episode or listen to that one song right away? :)

~~~
aes256
There is still no (to my knowledge) killer NAS setup for music.

Everything is slow, or messy, or has a crap interface. Sometimes all three.
Then you take your laptop out of your house and you don't have access to any
of your music.

~~~
jkubicek
iTunes Match is the closest I've gotten. I pay for the upgraded storage and
its enough to store my entire music library. Anywhere I go I can listen to
anything I own with no delay (assume a decent network connection).

~~~
_rs
I was under the impression that iTunes Match doesn't eat into your iCloud
storage, which is why it's a separate expense.

~~~
garretruh
It doesn't. You're limited to 25,000 of your own (i.e. not purchased from
iTunes) songs.

------
UnoriginalGuy
This is a very subtle advert. So quick digging raises one interesting
question: Are they being paid by Patriot?

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).

If they are being paid by Patriot then I would suggest it is immoral not to
say that in the advert/article.

~~~
Kurtz79
That's a cheap jab. In this case Jeff Atwood in these years would have
'advertised' programming chairs, video cards, SDD disks and many more tech
products.

I see only the genuine excitement of a tech geek over a new technology.

I will be definitely looking for a USB 3.0 stick, regardless of the brand, I
didn't even notice what brand it was until you pointed to it.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
It isn't meant to be a "jab," cheap or otherwise.

This blog post is, at least in part, a revenue generator for the blog (because
of referral links). My question was, did it also generate revenue from the
company who's products it links to/talks up?

If it had have been (or is) then I would consider that immoral. This
immorality has zero to do with making money from the blog post and everything
to do with a potential conflict of interests (between his commitment to his
readership and the company that would be paying him).

The Amazon referral links have no such conflict of interests as he could
equally have linked to any manufacturer's products and get the same revenue.

~~~
JoelSutherland
Regardless of how you meant it, it _is_ a cheap jab. You speculated without
proof that Atwood engaged in immoral behavior. That is a pretty bad thing to
do.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Speculation is speculation. I went to great pains to mention that it was a
question/concern. I also provided enough proof to at least justify said
speculation (i.e. it wasn't totally idle).

I disagree that is is, within its self, a bad thing to do. We should hold
people in the public eye to account, in particular when we spot what might be
potential conflicts of interests.

~~~
anigbrowl
No, you made a declarative statement at the very beginning of your comment
that 'This is a rather subtle advert.' By doing so, you're poisoning the well
for any questions that you pose afterwards. Your theory about the product
image turned out to be wrong, and saying that you're just asking questions
when you've previously stated opinions as fact is not really convincing.

I don't even like Jeff Atwood much, but I advise that you let this one go and
next times ask questions before shooting.

------
rdl
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.

I personally like the SanDisk Extreme ([http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-
Flash-Drive-sSDCZ80-03...](http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-
sSDCZ80-032G-AFFP/dp/B008AF383S)). Lexar Triton is also good.

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%.

~~~
xymostech
Does the SanDisk Extreme post speed ratings? It looks like the flash drive
shown in the article has some of the fastest posted speeds, at 200 MB/s read,
120 MB/s write. The SanDisk Extreme doesn't post speeds, it appears, but just
says "up to 10 times faster* than USB 2.0" and I can't figure out what the
asterisk refers to.

~~~
rdl
Measured performance around 120/80.

This is the kind of thing I'd defer to Tom's Hardware or maybe Ars Technica or
something for a comprehensive comparison, but I've never gone wrong in buying
Sandisk products (except when in Asia, where 90% of the devices, even at
"real" stores, were counterfeit with less than advertised storage capacity; I
ended up having a friend buy real products from Amazon and bring them to me
when she flew in).

------
zokier
> ... 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.

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.

~~~
phaker
The USB spec defines maximum plug sizes and minimum port spacings, different
for all connector series (A/B/mini x/micro x). USB A plug/device dimensions
are specified as 16x8mm MAX, i don't remember minimum spacing between A ports
and google isn't cooperating, but it's also defined somewhere in there. There
are some problems however:

If you don't want to put an USB logo on your device or otherwise use USB
trademarks you don't need to follow the spec to the letter and USB IF can't do
anything about it (see every other usb novelty device like lamps, fans etc).

If your device is too large you just need to ship it with an extension cable
and it's ok.

------
ujdtyhf
But how many 4KB IOPS can it do?

Answer: According to <http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive> , 128GB
version has 255 KBytes/s writes, 7 MBytes/s reads.

------
Anechoic
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.

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.

Doesn't anyone make a USB stick actually _designed_ 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.

~~~
icefox
For several years I kept my ssh keys on my phone so it was always on me. When
I need it I plop it in the dock and it would both charge and be mounted in
linux and in my .ssh/config it would point to the mount point for those keys.
Just another alternative.

------
barredo
Could you buy ~4 of these and make some sort of 'RAID' to increase
performance/redundancy/etc?

~~~
omh
You'd need to be careful that the RAID system knew which USB stick was which,
even if they were reconnected to different USB ports/controllers. The ZFS demo
above does this, but you might need to be careful with other software RAID
systems.

But part of the advantage here would be to have your OS on a portable stick
and move it between computers. If you're booting from one of the USB devices
then it would be a bit trickier to set up RAID as well.

~~~
doyouevenlift
Hey dumbass USB has has serial numbers since USB 2.0 your poor man's software-
raid-on-a-chip that came with your mobo might not check drive serials and rely
on port but don't make shit up.

I ain't even mad.

~~~
ersii
Hey, tone it down mister.

The parent does share a good thing that's not always immediately thought of.

Yes, USB devices do have serial numbers - absolutely. A lot of systems will
however not care and just mount at random, if it's automounted. As an example,
on Desktop machines - this is very common. You might use a Desktop for doing
this.

It's a good idea to combine the parents parent post with the, sadly, only good
nugget out of it.

Be careful to think over what happens when you restart/unplug the drives. Will
the mount points change? If so, be sure to configure up the mounting of the
drives with the USB ID of the device.

(USB ID is found with for example the `lsusb` program, you'll probably need to
install an extra package to get it)

------
nilsimsa
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.

~~~
Leftium
The Super Talent RC8 has a peppy SandForce SSD controller.

[http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-
rc...](http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-rc8-flash-
drive-21182.html)

~~~
codinghorror
Very cool, but Amazon says it's $230 for a 50 GB model!

I need to run more detailed benchmarks but hopefully the 64GB for $75 model is
somewhat close to "real" SSD performance on the full gamut of IO.

------
NLips
"An SSD..." / "A solid-state drive"

~~~
vetler
Thanks for the correction, you're right. I'm going to leave the title of the
submission for now though, to keep it consistent with the title of the actual
blog post.

~~~
ceejayoz
He's not right.

~~~
swift
As with many corner cases of English grammar, I don't think there is such a
decisive answer here that we can call him absolutely right or absolutely
wrong, but FWIW his approach ('a' vs 'an' selected based upon the
pronunciation of the acronym) is _much_ more common in my experience and is
generally accepted.

~~~
lttlrck
It's hardly a corner-case.

------
dysoco
I must be the only guy that still has an old 270Gb HDD and a 4Gb USB.

------
VikingCoder
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?

~~~
MattSayar
Probably still more than his old one.

------
GigabyteCoin
According to newegg.ca:
[http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&...](http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007959%20600082309%20600000482&IsNodeId=1&name=128GB)

The corsair usb 3.0 "voyager gt" is cheaper and faster.

~~~
mdonahoe
that's the 128gb model, not the 64 that jeff reviewed.

Prices for the 64gb are closer, but the corsair is $7 cheaper.

$10 shipping in ca? Damn.

------
mtgx
You can install Windows super fast from a USB 3.0 stick, too. It takes minutes
to install the whole OS.

~~~
ygra
If “minutes” ≤ “15 minutes” then the same holds true for USB 2, though. Or
around 10 if installing on an SSD.

------
aufreak3
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?

~~~
B-Con
The author here is very highly respected in this community and already made
his big bucks with other projects. If he says that he found something cool and
then uses an affiliate link, it's a 99.9% chance that there's nothing more too
it.

Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.

~~~
aufreak3
Thanks for the replies here.

Of course, I've been reading Jeff's posts for some time and know his creds. My
question was not really very specific to him and this post of his, but just
this time I caught myself mid-thought wanting to check whether the link is an
affiliate link. For another author, I might not have been surprised, but I was
in this case.

Mentioning that a link is an affiliate link (as cwd71 wrote) would be enough
for me to put more trust in an author.

------
programminggeek
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.

------
afterburner
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.

Check the return policy before you buy!

------
lucisferre
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).

These two deals are pretty good, both better than the Amazon price.

64GB:
[http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-...](http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=74959&vpn=AN005P-64G-CGY&manufacture=AData%20Technology&promoid=1230)

32GB:
[http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GS...](http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=69506&vpn=PEF32GSBUSB&manufacture=Patriot&promoid=1230)

* I do not work for NCIX, just figured I'd share the love.

------
R_Edward
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?

------
dexter313
>>Is the 'installing device driver' and 'safe to eject' malarkey still just as
slow and clunky with USB3?<<

Im curious about this, anyone has any experience?

Are USB 3.0 ports common now?

~~~
SquareWheel
Not in my experience. It certainly adds to the cost of mobos/cases, so most
pre-builds don't bother. Most people still buy pre-builds.

------
ichilton
What's he using to benchmark that? - anyone know?

What's the best benchmark tool for drives and/or network shares?

~~~
ygra
That's the Windows 8 Explorer copying files.

------
calgaryeng
Why is a post about USB sticks on the front page of HN... Don't get it!

------
asdfqwert
ffs... Its "AN" SSD, not "A SSD"

This site should really be called GrammarHorror.com

------
doyouevenlift
So this guy bought a new drive but wait Stack Careers! HN is becoming the mush
Reddit is.

~~~
icebraining
_" If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments
saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"_

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
SquareWheel
Based on his username (a meme) and one previous comment, I'd say he's
perfectly aware (and intends to post it anyway).

