16gig flash drives. Huh.

[thewayne]

I'm not surprised. Saw it today at Staples, $100. I knew 8 gig were out, so it was only a matter of time, a VERY short period of time, before they had 16.

I'm perfectly happy with a 1 gig that rides in my pocket, quite useful at work. There are times that I could have used a larger one, but that was usually when I was copying big directories between school and home computers. I just find it kind of amusing that we now have pocket flash drives that have three times the capacity of a DVD disc.

I wonder where it will end, considering that you can fit any microcomputer operating system that I know of on one of 'em...

Comments

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

My hope is that if the thumb drives are that powerful then soon they should be getting fairly cheap and can be put into laptops and stuff for less cash. I long for the day when the words moving parts and portable electronics no longer have to go hand in hand.

I should probably restate part of that because it reads funny to me. If the flash drives are becoming that big and cheap, then cheaper solid state hard drives shouldn't be too far behind.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The problem with thumb drives, and also with SSD (solid state drives) is they have a finite number of writes possible, so they're excellent for things that do a lot of reading: operating system, program files, etc. But you might want to have a physical drive for cache, data files, etc.

Still, ram drives kick butt. An old trick in the Dos days (up through Windows 98 and ME, IIRC) was you create a small ram drive, 64k or so, and you copied command.com to it and set an environment variable called COMSPEC to point to it. It increased your system speed AMAZINGLY because EVERY program called command.com! It also tremendously cut down on disk activity.

Apparently with the right model of Vista, you can plug in a thumb drive and Vista will exploit the additional memory, and with 16gig drives, that's pretty considerable. The problem is, Microsoft screwed up the implementation, or so I hear, and they don't do it as well as they could've.

[silveradept]

I'm thinking that as sizes increase, we'll see a lot more suites like Portable Apps, or a disk image that makes for, like, ParanoidLinux-on-a-stick, so that everyone can have their preferred environment for their browsing, no matter where they are. The thing is, we're still not to the point where we go booting from our memory sticks.