

The tourist map of flash drives - no_gravity
http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/
I made this map of the 200 most popular flash drives on Amazon today. It looks a bit like a mandelbrot set :)<p>I made this for myself, because I wanted to have an overview of whats available. Do you think this is something people want? It could easily be extended to ssd-drives, monitors and whatnot.
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morsch
Bought a new drive last week (ended up buying a 64 GB Mach Extreme stick). The
most difficult aspect is finding a stick that's _fast_.

The actual as opposed to advertised speeds vary wildly. Anything below 20 MB/s
isn't really state of the art anymore, and the one I bought gets 60 MB/s.
Drives with 100 MB/s are available; after that comes the very-fast-very-
expensive USB3 SSD market. If you buy a drive without paying attention to
benchmarks, you can easily wind up with a 5 MB/s dud.

For what it's worth: I couldn't find a micro usb drive (ie. about as small as
the USB port itself) that had great transfer rates. The best I could find was
-- I think -- a Corsair stick offering 20 MB/s. If you want 50 MB/s+, like I
did, you're stuck with "regular sized" drives, for the moment; all the faster
drives I found were even more bulky.

~~~
twic
Bitte:

[http://www.usbstick-charts.de/](http://www.usbstick-charts.de/)

~~~
morsch
Very nice. One week too late though. :)

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weirdcat
Cool, but (there's always a but) there's one parameter sorely missing --
speed. What's the point of having a humongous pendrive if you need two days to
copy its contents?

Unfortunately it's not as simple as price and size, with the advertised speeds
tending to be higher than measured. Also, a while ago I got a drive which
promised pretty nice nominal read and write speeds; it turned out however that
it had a small buffer and for larger files (or more of them) the transfer
speed slowed to a crawl within a few seconds.

Tricky items, those little drives.

~~~
IgorPartola
Exactly what I was thinking. I have a ton of pictures of the kids I wanted to
transfer to my in-laws. My first inclination was to throw them on a couple of
flash drives like these. In the end I just grabbed a 500 GB USB HDD as it was
less of a hassle.

I also learned that while the cloud solves lots of problems for me, sometimes
a flash drive is still the easiest thing to use.

Edit: Then again, sometimes speed doesn't matter. I just got a USB drive in
the form of a fictional character that sits next to my other trinkets above my
desk. I use it to back up my GPG and SSH keys in case my laptop goes kablooey.

~~~
Domenic_S
> _In the end I just grabbed a 500 GB USB HDD as it was less of a hassle._

Sneakernet wins again!

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maaarghk
I think this would be more useful if it were a graph of capacity against
price, rather than a graph of capacity per price against price - which is a
bit weird - by default.

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chrisBob
[http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb](http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb)

~~~
Tloewald
Yes, this is much more useful as it doesn't require multiplying every
coordinate in your head.

It's still kind of broken though. How about actually plotting the drives at
their correct position rather than stacking them neatly?

Capacity vs. Price seems perfectly reasonable. The PNY 128GB drive which is at
the top of the original linked graph is nestled between two other drives --
one smaller and pricier per dollar, the other the same size and pricier per
dollar.

~~~
no_gravity
"How about actually plotting the drives at their correct position rather than
stacking them neatly?"

It would be one big mess of overlapping stuff. I can code an option for that
if there is demand for it.

~~~
Tloewald
Yes it would have that problem, but it would have the advantage of conveying
useful information. How about plotting smaller points and providing the image
and info on rollover -- the tiny icons don't serve much purpose.

Differentiating USB3 vs. USB2 would probably be informative too.

~~~
twic
Whilst such a graph would certainly have the advantage of displaying the data
accurately, do bear in mind that it would have the disadvantage of not looking
like a partridge.

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gabriel34
IMHO you shouldn't do it in a grid, it's confusing as a graphic and in some
cases results in wrong representation of the data (which every graphical
representation of data should avoid), for example, outliers can be too close
to "normal" data, distance between two points is not representative of actual
variables variation (sorry for alliteration), overlapping points seem to be
different and you can't infer a drive price/cost to be better than other
unless they share one coordinate(the worst, because that's the purpose of the
graphic)

I'd say your points need to be smaller or you need to use less points in order
to represent your data correctly.

I'd like to see a line representing the 1$ per GB ratio and other one
representing the mean ratio

~~~
basseq
Agreed: not to mention that the y-axis is labeled "More Capacity" but is
actually "Greater Capacity per Dollar".

Here's a more traditional chart with a roughly y=x trendline:

[http://snag.gy/bNTiJ.jpg](http://snag.gy/bNTiJ.jpg)

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ynniv
This would be better if the y axis were actually capacity and not $/GB.

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no_gravity
Interesting. This seems to be one of the top requests. Im not quite sure how
that would look like. Because there are only so many different capacities
(1/2/4/8...GB).

Here is a try to make the y-axis strictly capacity based:

[http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb](http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb)

Do you think this is better?

~~~
kaoD
Unfortunately, that still shows some 64Gb drives higher than 128Gb ones.

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no_gravity
Yes, thats a different issue.

All I changed in the y=gb chart is the meaning of the y-axis.

You cannot perfectly sort things in a grid.

~~~
largote
Not being able to rely on the graph being properly sorted makes it a bit
useless...

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no_gravity
I made this map of the 200 most popular flash drives on Amazon today. It looks
a bit like a mandelbrot set :)

I made this for myself, because I wanted to have an overview of whats
available. Do you think this is something people want? It could easily be
extended to ssd-drives, monitors and whatnot.

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llamataboot
Love it, but it seems like this would be a perfect case for using D3 rather
than hacking away in pure JS, and a good excuse to learn D3

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no_gravity
How would it benefit from D3?

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acomjean
I think the D3 suggestion would be it would allow the chart to be dynamic,
changing an axis from price/gb <-> price

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paul_f
This would be far more useful if shipping costs were included. A $6 flash
drive with another $6 in shipping isn't really a $6 flash drive now is it?

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basicallydan
Have you considered open-sourcing this? It's very cool but I think it could be
improved.

I think a more useful view would be to show the flash drives in terms of price
per GB, within a certain range. By plotting them in this discrete (best word I
could think of) where they cannot occupy the same space in the graph it's
misleading about the best value for money.

~~~
no_gravity
Not sure what to do with it by now. I'm really excited to see it reaching the
front page. Maybe this is an indication that a "scatterplot-shopping-site"
could actually be a good idea. Yes, there is a lot of ways this could be
improved. Would be quite easy to add filtering and different views.

~~~
lucio
[http://in.tecnogob.com/cpus](http://in.tecnogob.com/cpus) something similar,
for CPUs, using D3

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carlmcqueen
Is there anyway to add in the rating on amazon for weight? A lot of the drives
that sit higher in gb per dollar have pretty terrible user ratings. If not
weighted on the chart, at least the # of stars/rating in the hover
information.

Then, if not ranked, in the information the speed to which the drive works?

Over all, really cool site! I love it.

~~~
no_gravity
The data comes from the Amazon api, which neither provides ratings nor speed.
As for ratings, im not sure if it would be ok to scrape them. Probably not.

Speed is a really complicated issue, because afaik the speed can even be
different between 2 drives that are sold as the same. The brands do not
produce the drives themselfes, but brand drives from different manufacturers.
So you can order 2 times the same drive and get 2 completely different ones.
Except for price and capacity.

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sp332
The one at the top is (according to the reviews on amazon) a counterfeit PNY
drive that is only ~64 GB.

Hey no_gravity: this comment is "dead" and I don't know why
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465983)

~~~
no_gravity
Yeah, I saw it had some bad reviews. Not sure if i should remove that one. I
wanted to see "just the facts" so i included all popular drives.

Strange, that the comment is dead. It is the explanation of this post, so
what's wrong with it?

~~~
sp332
No idea, appeal to info(at)ycombinator.com

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51Cards
Very cool. The 1 TB drive off to the far right though, shouldn't it be way off
the top of the chart? Assuming you made some kind of adjustment here to keep
the outliers within a reasonable range though it looks like it's a 64GB drive.

Edit: Looks like the axis are inverted?

~~~
no_gravity
y-axis is gigabyte per dollar. if you want only gigabyte, it would look like
this:

[http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb](http://things.gnod.com/flashdrives/#y=gb)

I have to make it more clear or switch to a different default view. Not sure
yet.

~~~
bazzargh
I'm finding things to the left of things that are cheaper, eg Integral Neon
32Gb (29.18) left of Centon Datastick Pro 64 (29.97)?

~~~
bazzargh
Duh, typed the wrong example there. The Leef Supra (24.99) is to the right of
the Integral Neon, but less expensive.

~~~
no_gravity
Yes, you cannot sort them "perfectly" without overlapping.

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aw3c2
I would be really interested in the amount of amazon affiliate money a site
like this can create. If you are willing to share (perfect opportunity to
boost it to the frontpage again in a month) I would be grateful!

~~~
no_gravity
Sure, can do. Im taking guesses :) Since it only links to amazon.com im not
sure it will generate too much. Amazon doesn't have an international affiliate
program. You have to sign up for every country individually. If this rakes in
tons of money, I will do that of course :)

Also some punishment seems to have kicked in. This post suddenly jumped down
20 positions. Posts older and with less points are above it now.

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todd8
It would be a more useful graphic if the axis were actually capacity and cost
(as labeled). As it is now the Y-axis is showing us the capacity/cost. When
looking for drive I'm usually not trying to maximize capacity for a certain
budget (say by buying several 8G drives). More often I want a drive that
doesn't cost too much that has a certain capacity.

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dm2
This is the best price / storage / speed combination I could find:
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HXHIOM/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HXHIOM/)

The page says it's max speed is both 90MB/s and 52MB/s, I'm not sure which is
correct.

$0.53 per GB for the 16GB version.

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STRiDEX
Check out this similar website for all hard drive types on newegg:
[http://forre.st/storage](http://forre.st/storage)

it's open source:
[https://github.com/forrestv/storage](https://github.com/forrestv/storage)

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resu
This is incredibly cool!

Did you create the chart yourself or is it built on top of some kind of js
library?

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no_gravity
No library, just some hours of hacking away in plain javascript.

~~~
resu
That's awesome, the result looks great :)

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oskarhane
Performance/Bandwidth vs price would be interesting as well. But it probably
correlates with $/GB.

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largote
Unfortunately this has the effect of giving you the impression that you're
reliably visualizing the data when it just provides a visualization loosely
based on reality.

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kencausey
Thanks! I think this could use a date as to when the data was collected, or if
it is always up to date I suggest you make a clear statement to that effect.

~~~
no_gravity
Yes. Interestingly, I just found your comment downvoted on the bottom of the
page. I wonder why, because I think your point is really important. Im
experimenting with the speed of updates and will have it explained on the page
as soon as I have it settled.

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markovbling
This is really cool!

Interested to hear how you got the price/size data out of Amazon? :)

~~~
no_gravity
They have an API called "product advertising api".

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nodata
How is the 1 tb flash drive on the far right lower than the 32 gb drives on
the left?

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roeme
The axes[1] are really poorly named.

 _[1] English plurals can be funny._

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no_gravity
That could be. Im from Germany. What would be good names in english?

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roeme
See comments below.

(A cool thing btw. Just to make sure you don't get me wrong)

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wrongc0ntinent
Mouseover is a little screwed up for touch devices. Nice job though, very
useful.

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no_gravity
I now added a handler so the tooltip disappers when you click or touch
anywhere outside of it. Does this solve it?

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PaulHoule
it doesn't work with IE 11

how would things look if you plotted just capacity on the y axis instead of
capacity/price?

what algorithm do you use to make the points form a grid in the dense areas?

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no_gravity
Yes, I don't have windows, so debugging IE is a bit painful. If there is
demand, I would do it of course.

You can add #y=gb to the url, it will change capacity/price to price.

I just brute force the positions. In the first iteration, I go through all
empty cells and choose the best. For all items. Then I search for items that
can be swapped.

~~~
AdamTReineke
I'd be a +1 for IE 11 (disclaimer, I work at Microsoft on the IE developer
tools but use IE at home). Regarding testing in IE, have you seen the
[http://www.modern.ie](http://www.modern.ie) website? There are Windows VMs
there you can download for free for any host OS that have all the different
versions of IE.

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sebnukem2
It seems like the axes are wrong.

