Comments on: Flash vs Hard

By: DT

DT — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:50:24 +0000

Anthony, thats why there's Lanyards and Keyrings. ;-)

By: Anthony @ Freya Swimwear

Anthony @ Freya Swimwear — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:29:44 +0000

True, I agree that flash drives are a lot better, but I tend to lose my flash drives everytime i carry it with me! so if i get portable hard disk the chances of that happening would be a lot less!
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By: Reynold @ White File Cabinet

Reynold @ White File Cabinet — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:15:02 +0000

this was a really interesting read. Thanks for doing all that work! I know that I’ve always wondered about the actual speeds and transfer times of my flash drives, but (like you) I end up giving them away, and right now I don’t have enough to do a reasonably thorough comparison.
Cheers!

By: DT

DT — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:56:52 +0000

Joseph, I'm afraid this it out of my league (I'm neither a Linux/Knoppix user nor do I partition my flash drives). I guess it depends on what flash drive model you're using. Did you try the Knoppix wiki? Maybe the following links will help: Help with USB Flash Drive Partitioning How to partition a USB Stick?

By: Joseph @ Festival Tents

Joseph @ Festival Tents — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:38:22 +0000

For those of us that want to carry around just ONE USB stick with everything on it (say, on our keychains:), how can I get Parted Magic (or another partition manager) to run on the same bootable USB as Knoppix?

I’ve played around a little, but just copying the files on and browsing to them and trying to launch didn’t work

Reference article on USB Bootable Partition Managers: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/how_to_repartition_your_hard_drive_for_free_without_formatting_or_losing_data

By: Chris @ Sales Recruitment

Chris @ Sales Recruitment — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:55:56 +0000

Hardd drives with 16 GB of storage were introduced sometime around the beginning of 1999. Barely 10 years later, we carry around that much on our keychains. Heck, my laptop only has a 32 GB solid state drive, and I manage to scrape by with that. These things are essentially miniature hard drives. I’m starting to wonder why we don’t just take our entire computing environment, operating system and all, along with us and boot it up on whatever computer we happen to encounter in the wild.

By: Edward Ruiz

Edward Ruiz — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:47:45 +0000

Thats a very good comparison. I love flashdrives but for mass storage, I use SATA Hard Disk.

By: marc @ format hard drive

marc @ format hard drive — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:10:26 +0000

Yes Flash drives are really great and ideal for those who travel anywhere with great concern about the weight and reliability. I hope that hard disk drive maufacturers think of a way into making an internal drive with the features and advantages of a flash drive.

By: DT

DT — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:53:46 +0000

It sure does. But just so you know, I havent come up with the designs myself. They are created by all kinds of people and companies. I just promote them on this blog.

By: Shezard @ Printing Birmingham

Shezard @ Printing Birmingham — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:12:26 +0000

Agreed, a flash drive definitely outways a portable hard drive, also I love the designs you have come up with.. I honestly got sick of the standard look of it, this is definitely something that makes it interesting!

By: Woodburning Stove

Woodburning Stove — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:02:02 +0000

I obviously prefer a flash drive over a hard drive for the obvious reason stated above…however if you get a 64 GB flash drive 20 bucks that pretty cheap.Because a 250gb usb external hard drive is about 100 bucks, which isnt that cheap..Cant wait for flash drives to extend its capacity further!

By: lab supplies

lab supplies — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:42:53 +0000

thanks for the info, I totally agree. also the compactness makes it so much more practical but this is pretty obvious. thanks

By: DT

DT — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:11:28 +0000

Actually, with 4.8Gbit/s USB 3.0 is faster than eSATA. However, future versions of eSATA and FireWire are supposed to be 6 Gbit/s and up. Then again you have flash drives that also offer eSATA like the above Throttle or the Kanguru e-Flash. But yeah, an edge on fastness may speak for HDDs - that is, if you're not concerned about mobility for instance.

By: Cheap External Hard Drives

Cheap External Hard Drives — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:01:24 +0000

Hey, this is a good discussion on the topics. You provided good argument for both usb and hard drives.

But if we can use a external HDD, then it is better than USB drives. Even if USB 3 is there, external hard drives can match it by using eSATA ports. What do you think?

By: DT

DT — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:18:49 +0000

Thanks for your input Christian, very much appreciated. I fixed the cycle figures. It’s a little confusing sometimes as different sources give different numbers.

>>“5. Writing and reading of data is faster once utilized with USB 3.0 (480 MB/sec compared to 150 MB/sec of a hard drive).”

Those are the theoretical transfer speeds of the interfaces. Modern hard disk drives can read at around 70 MB/s while high performance USB flash drives is stuck around 30 MB/s.< <

Either way, once USB 3.0 hits the shelves both 30 MB/s as well as 70 MB/s will be a thing of the past.

By: Christian V. Schmidt

Christian V. Schmidt — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:04:22 +0000

“2.Memory sticks can usually be reprogrammed up to 100 times while hard disks supposedly can be rewritten up to 10000 times.”

Hard drives can perform up to 50.000 read/writes before errors occur. After that the risk of data loss increases dramatically.

Flash drives are typically specified to 10.000 writes, but may go much higher, before they simply stop being writeable.

“5. Writing and reading of data is faster once utilized with USB 3.0 (480 MB/sec compared to 150 MB/sec of a hard drive).”

Those are the theoretical transfer speeds of the interfaces. Modern hard disk drives can read at around 70 MB/s while high performance USB flash drives is stuck around 30 MB/s.

USB flash drives however, have no seek time and no rotational delay, which is typically 8ms each for hard disk drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/114-How-Long-Does-a-Flash-Drive-Last.html