Thumb Drives?

matsu · December 7, 2002 6:00PM

Yea or nay? Anybody use them? I'm thinking of getting one for back-up purposes. I need for it to move between macs and PC's. If it were "driverless" that would be a big plus, as it might from time to time have to transfer a file to an anonymous computer (mostly colleagues laptops).

Anything out there that fits the driverless description for the both the mac and the PC? Barring that, anybody using these things? If so which, and how do you like it?

kesh · December 7, 2002 10:21PM

For backup? eh... only if you have a tiny number of files, or small ones. They're nice and convenient, but for roughly $100 more you can have an iPod, which is 5 Gb vs. the 'pen' drives at about 128 Mb. If the physical size is that important, it's worth it to get the pen drives. Or, if you just need USB connectivity.

Otherwise, the iPod is a better investment. Much more backup space, music playback and contact/address info. All of which fits into a front pants/jacket pocket.

stunned · December 7, 2002 10:26PM

thumbs up for thumb drives!

I am using a brand called Trek, which came free with my digital camera. It has 64mb of space and is both windows and mac compatible.

Its very convenient, small and easy to use. I 've used it on a couple of PC and mac laptops and its truely driverless!

One flip side of thumb drives is that most of them are PC formateed. Hence, to copy a 10mb of data from a mac to the thumb drive would take almost twenty minutes!!!! However, it is considerably much faster if u copy from a PC to the thumb drive.

But of course, once the data is stored in the thumb drive, it takes only a while to download the files u want form the thumb drive, both for mac and pc.

I strongly recommened the trek thumb drive.

matsu · December 7, 2002 10:45PM

I found something called a sandisk cruzer, which sandisk claims is driverless for both the PC and mac. It's not a traditional thumb drive, it's more of a sleeve that fits over an SD card, about 3x1", so while it's a little bigger, you can replace the SD card with other capacities up to 256MB. For me, for back-up, that's perfect. It's mostly text (speeches, articles, notes, some contact info) that I want to keep backed up to it. Smaller would be good so I'll look around a bit more. However, I don't see where I could get an iPod that cheap? I can get 64MB for 50 Canadian, I may even be able to get 128 for about 80-90, which is pretty good since I've seen them about for 75 USD, can't get an iPod for less than 450 Canadian, and there's always the HDD failure issue with the iPod aswell.

Now that I've looked around, I may be able to get USBDrive thumb drives even cheaper, but I'm not sure if that's for the driverless version or not. They look a little slimmer too. Any other experiences?

20 Minutes for 10MB? That's f-ing slow! Anyway around this? It will probably talk tto macs at least as much as too PC's. I wasn't aware that you had to format solid state cards uniquely for PC and Mac ???

[ 12-07-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>

wmf · December 8, 2002 1:57PM

[quote]Originally posted by Matsu:

<strong>I wasn't aware that you had to format solid state cards uniquely for PC and Mac ???

</strong><hr></blockquote>

You have to use some kind of filesystem: FAT, FAT32, HFS+, etc. If you format it as HFS+ you won't be able to mount it on Windows.

I think just about all flash drives are driverless, since they use the standard USB Mass Storage protocol.

josephg · December 8, 2002 11:24PM

I'd recommend using a Firewire drive--the thumb drives seem way too small, unless you're only dealing with text files. I got a 5GB Firefly from the Apple Store online for $99, which uses the same HD as the iPod. Works beautifully, quickly, and dependably.

I haven't used it with Windows, but it should work if you format it as FAT32.

Thumb Drives?

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