Ask HN: Is USB3 flash drive a joke?

[eimrine]

Nowadays there is harder to buy a good old USB2 drive than nasty USB3 one. I do not see any pros of latter, only cons:

I can not use it for reinstalling OS, my old computer doesn't see them in BIOS

I can not use it in car, my old multimedia system doesn't see them

Their writing speed never exceeds 30MBps which is an upper limit of USB2

What is the reason of abandoning USB2 standard if USB3 is not that backwards-compatible as new versions of PCI/SATA for example?

[wryoak]

Nobody wants to support old tech forever, regardless of any personal or financial value in doing so. People don’t use USB in their car anymore they use Bluetooth. People don’t mess with their BIOS anymore (boy are computer manufacturers and OS developers seeing to that). People don’t care about transfer speed because they don’t use USB drives as much with free, near infinite cloud storage. You seem to be willfully ignoring the changes in the market over the last decade.

Trust me your use cases touch me, but the world is moving on.

[fuzzfactor]

Some of the EMTEC USB3 flash drives ended up being very slow because they were just not as decent as an average USB2 drive.

They just had the blue plastic insert and were packaged as USB3 since they were actually plug-compatible.

A real joke that was not funny at all.

The BIOS recognition problem goes back quite a bit further, USB drives are pre-partitioned and pre-formatted, but not like you would accomplish personally by having an OS respond to the data-structures it detects in the blank USB drive on an individual basis.

Starting with a blank drive the result is that only a small bit of very key data needs to be written to sector 0, and a handful of other sectors according to the hardware structure, and voila a complete partition layout and filesystem storage cabinet are then in place. Ready & waiting for user files & folders.

After that, to prepare additional blank drives, you really don't need to have an OS do the deed if you wanted to have identical drives be partitioned & formatted identically. All you would need to do is copy the previously prepared partitioned & formatted drive to the new raw hardware during production. And this can be almost instantaneous because it's only a few key sectors when the filesystem doesn't have any user files yet. Basically a few kilobytes from a hardware-specific Layout Data File are sprinkled into a few designated blank sectors of the raw hardware, and that makes them all identically partitioned & formatted instantly. And out the door.

The breakdown comes when the circuit board or memory chips change through time, and the factory continues using the proven Layout Data File to prepare non-identical raw hardware for sale. If the drive is close enough to the same size, and the original formatting structure was really robust (not as many as there should be), most of the time a decent OS will still work with it fine, but even then lots of times the bios alone can not access the disk when the dis-similar hardware misleads the motherboard into thinking that a partition starts at a different sector than it did in the original hardware.

Probably need to clean up the drive, repartition, and reformat from scratch.

Just in time I already posted a guideline in another comment on a good approach using Windows:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39848221

[simonblack]

Most of my USB flash drives get reformatted or repartitioned or both. With some of my flash drives, the first gig or two are in use and all the rest of the drive-space is wasted.

Flash drives are the 'sheets of paper' or 'floppy drives' of today. Consider them 'throwaways'.

I do buy some high-capacity USB3 drives of good quality. They have complete operating systems installed.

[lesserknowndan]

Have you tried re-formatting with GPT and FAT32?