"Small" (physical size) thumb drives

Hi,

Recommendations for physically small, modest size (~16G), "fast" thumb drives?

I've recently been using more "traditional" sized SanDisk drives and have been disappointed with their performance (speed) and reliability (I've had a couple "suddenly" decide to become read-only devices -- despite the absence of a write-protect switch!)

Use is primarily for multiple reads but some routine writes, as well.

Reply to
Don Y
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Fast means USB 3.0. Consider that a minimum requirement. If your machinery doesn't have USB 3.0, get a PCIe-1X or Express card adapter card.

Sandisk has the Ultra Fit which costs about $15 for 16GB. I've had 5 of these as data loggers in weather stations for about 3 months. No problems so far.

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Speed looks quite good: There are are few faster but larger USB 3.0 drives, but all USB 3.0 thumb drives are faster than USB 2.0.

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

These are appliances -- no "add-in cards" possible. USB2.

The point of my comment is that there seems to be a wide range of performances from thumb drives ON THE SAME HOST. I can probably attest to a factor of two with reasonably modern thumb drives. The most notable difference being write performance.

(Of course, host to host variations are based on how the USB controller is tied to the processor)

I can't imagine they see heavy "speed" requirements logging weather conditions :-/

Reply to
Don Y

Yep. Different block sizes and host buffer sizes have an effect. Try some benchmarking software and see if that helps pin down the culprit. This week, I'm partial to Crystal Disk Mark (portable version):

Guilty as charged. My guess(tm) is about 2.5MBytes per day for WX data. Captured camera images are about 300KBytes each at 10 min intervals or about 72MBytes/day. Typically, a 32GB flash drive will hold about 1 years data before it complains of being out of spare blocks.

Reading between your lines, you're pounding on the USB flash drive, probably running it as a filesystem. If there's highly repetative writing, you might be killing the drive. Most USB flash drives have some form of wear leveling but vary in the amount of spare blocks and the algorithm used. No clue which is best for your unspecified application:

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Jeff Liebermann

I've only used thumb drives as portable media, to date. So, none have really been "beaten on", significantly.

What seems to happen is performance degrades with use -- as if the block reallocation mechanism is encountering more errors than it expects (or, is taking extra time to scrub previously used blocks).

I have no idea as to the cause of the "read-only" transformation. Thankfully, the data on the drive was still readable -- even if the drive itself was no longer useful.

I would *like* to use them in that manner -- though primarily as a read-only filesystem. But, I imagine the block remapping algorithms also take into consideration read-wear and remap sectors that start to exhibit "high" internal error rates.

I'd only use a portion of the drive for log files, etc. Depending on how often those are flushed to the medium, this could represent a lot of activity -- or very little.

Reply to
Don Y

On Sun, 24 May 2015 18:21:44 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

Some machines are old enough to not have a PCIe-Xanything in them. Also, a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2 port is blazing fast too, when compared to a legacy "thumb drive".

I use an eSATA SSD inside a USB 3.0 enclosure, and even on a USB 2 port it screams way faster than ANY flash drive I have ever seen. I get

7 second Ubuntu boots, and reads and writes after it is up are blazing fast too. Needless to say it is even faster attached to a USB 3.0 port. I also have my Linux swap drive on the same bird.

That is a really nice 'drive'. I like the form factor a lot. I'll bet it too is faster than any typical USB 2 'drive' when it is in a USB

2 port. The memory circuitry itself is faster, and since it is backward compatible, it simply means that something finally pushes a USB 2 port up near its limits.

You should always check Amazon, etc., as my experience is that NewEgg is not always the best price. Kinda hard to beat that one though.

formatting link

Twice as much for $2 more.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 18:32:48 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

They are also all faster than all USB 2 drives when in a USB 2 port.

You kinda worded that wrong in that view. :-)

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 18:33:57 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Get one anyway. It will b e faster than any USB 2 drive you can find, and they work in USB 2 ports.

It also depends on where you write from. If it is the same HD your swap file is on, and you have a small amount of RAM (2GB or less), you can get limited to 10MB/s even on a fast thumb drive.

Not just the USB. And take note that if the machine has a PCI bus, ALL peripherals are tertiary to that.

Time stamps, and such. Nit picker. :-)

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 22:48:36 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

You can beat the hell out of these newer things and they rarely ever puke.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 23:40:19 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Format it NTFS and use a large block size.

Or go wild and run Linux and format it EXT4 or even Reiser FS. (someone should re-start that dev and get Reiser 4 back up. It was very robust.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 23:40:19 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Never let anything format your flash memory "drive" as 'exFAT'. That has to be the most retarded file system ever. I have a 64GB stick I cannot get at with ANY OS. I am so pissed. It was some lame camera that did it too (Sony).

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sun, 24 May 2015 23:40:19 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Partition the 'drive' with a separate volume for your logs, and that will lock in the 'write area'.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

I think I'd look at (for small & fast) microSDHC to USB adapters (for just fast you can use the non-micro, too.)

If your device on the other end has a SDHC slot, it generally blows USB out of the water.

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Reply to
Ecnerwal

I saw one a few years ago (USB 2 only) that wasn't much bigger than the USB connector itself - it had a little plastic bar on the back so you could get it out of the USB port again, kind of like a USB Bluetooth or wireless mouse adapter.

You inserted a micro SD card into the *USB connector* side of the drive

- in other words, you could only do that when it wasn't plugged in to a USB port.

I don't remember how fast it was but it sure was tiny.

This thing is close to what I remember, but it has both regular USB and micro USB ports, so it's a little bigger. It doesn't say but I bet it's USB 2 only.

formatting link

If you're getting them from Ebay, then they're probably not really SanDisk. :) If you're getting them from a real SanDisk dealer, then the probability of a fake drops to only about 50% or so.

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds

I think size becomes an issue, then. The really tiny USB thumb drives seem to *barely* protrude from the machine (maybe 1/4"?). This is not ideal but is "tolerable". I'd imagine a microsdhc adapter would be at least double that.

The only other interfaces that are available are SATA (internal). AFAICT, there have been some SATA Flash drives (not the same as SSD's) for this sort of purpose. But, I suspect that's a more expensive and less supported option. (small flash drive being the cheap and dirty option; PXE is probably the most realistic solution)

Reply to
Don Y

formatting link

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Exactly. One of my wireless mice has the USB wireless adapter stored in its battery compartment.

Really? Now *that's* slick! I don't need to remove the flash card while it's installed (doesn't buy me anything... unplug adapter+card or unplug card... same functional difference!)

I can only use USB2.

I don't buy much of anything on eBay, anymore.

Costco. Probably as reliable a reseller as one can expect (I doubt they place orders for "SanDisk thumb drives" with "Peoples' Flash Drive Factory #574")

I'd not seen this with smaller thumb drives. The problem (performance, read-only) seem to be introduced when capacities crept up above 16G. The "read only" failure seemed related to NTFS filesystems so not sure if there is something about their delayed write implementation that screws up some internal structure. (I won't be using NTFS)

Reply to
Don Y

It depends more on the user, than the hardware. Some people are able to destroy literally everything they touch. I have friends and customers[1] like that. I can give them a perfectly working computah and within a short time, everything that moves is broken, and everything on the drive is trashed. There are also places on the planet that have resident black holes, where everything within the event horizon literally sucks on delivery. I'm sure there are suitable explanations for the curse, but since I'm not into occult practices, I can't offer anything sane. If you are able to beat the hell out of solid state memory and survive, please consider yourself very fortunate.

[1] Customers pay me to fix their machines. Friends do not pay me. Other than that, they are identical.
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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Looks like many different variations on the same idea:

Hint: If you're looking for something that's difficult to describe in words, try searching photos instead:

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

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