Oh shit, another myth goes down the drain. As someone who grew up in Israel I was always proud of M Systems and Dov Moran as the inventors of the Thumb Drive and creating something nobody thought of before.
> Multiple individuals have staked a claim to being the inventor of the USB flash drive. On April 5, 1999, Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems, an Israeli company, filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk".
> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028.
More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.
Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
> Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g. Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress support on their recent models of higher priced camera systems). Prices are very high, but that's justifiable IMO - unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up with the performance and endurance that professional equipment demands.
There is more than a 10x price difference between slow run-of-the-mill sd cards and the high speed cards a photographer might go for. Why would it be any different for thumb drives? Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve and make up a small fraction of the total demand. And to make it worse people who need speed tend to be less price sensitive.
I ran into this sort of issue with the Steam Deck, too. Initially ordered a slower-but-still-recommended cheaper SD card. Figured I could deal with the slower write speeds as that should just mean slower downloads.
I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.
Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but every part of the experience saw a dramatic improvement after I switched to a higher-spec SD card.
Just watch the video on disassembly and install a m.2. So much faster than an sd card. Its a 5/10 fiddly i hear. Ive yet to open mine but I bought the baller option. My steam controller was reasonably easy with a small plastic tool for prying, also available as automotive trim removers cheaply.
> 10x price difference ... Why would it be any different for thumb drives?
I'm more concerned with the reliability (in my experience). The middle-priced ones are not necessarily better than the cheapest ones.
> Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve
I'm not asking for 1000 MB/s write speed. Why do I still sometimes get 10MB/s in 2023? Is it much to expect around 100 MB/s write (HDD-level speeds) in most "average" thumb-drive?
Some are much better than others. Where I work we have some embedded systems in lab that can only program from USB. We are constantly reprogramming them, so we go through a lot of USB drives. The cheap ones last maybe a week in the lab, we have found one that will last for months - they cost 5 times as much, but last at least 20 times longer.
My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds.
Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.
The quality of these things has really gone down as they've gotten commoditized, it seems.
The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made them appear magic.
People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at the time.
Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.
Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter years. Things got progressively worse going from 5¼" ~170K single-sided CBM-1541 to 5¼" 360K double-sided to 5¼" 1.2M to 3½" 720 to 3½" 1.44M. I never really used 8" floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether those were better or worse than their 5¼" successors but the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the latter years of the 3½" period.
Out of curiosity, your comment made me fire up the C64 and 1541 I keep as a conversation starter in my office. It still loads the, uh, evaluation copy of Defender of the Crown which 1988 me copied onto a 3M DS,DD floppy in February of that year, if the scrawny handwriting on the label is to be believed.
(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)
So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!
They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.
So many floppies were damaged by magnets that almost all people still remember "magnets and floppies do not mix". That was a hard-learned lesson for many people.
I remember loading some of my old floppies about 10 years ago, maybe as a bit of a nostalgia trip. I believe I'd kept my floppy drive around that long but probably hadn't actually used it in 10 years. Although I was a pretty heavy user in the mid 90s I was kind of kind of shocked how brutally slow and loud the copying operation was, and I didn't have memories of either of those aspects being great!
There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.
They were really a big deal. For the first time there was convenient way for people to share music, books, or videos. I remember everyone in college had their USB drive on them all the time and would just casually exchange media before everyone had access to high speed Internet.
Comments like this remind me of how spoiled I was by my college network. It was before any non-geeks (and many geeks) had USB drives, but we had super fast internet access and even faster intranet; DirectConnect and various IM solutions were how people exchanged media.
When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.
I believe that Windows ME was the first (non NT based) windows with out-of-the-box support for USB MSC, though 98 probably got it in a service pack at some point to support it. Certainly in 1999 there was a good chance that a USB stick would not work in a computer. By the time XP was common, USB sticks worked everywhere.
I guess manufacturers assumed people will first and foremost use them to move data around, not to backup/archive it, which makes sense as they were somewhat pricey initially, while the role of "write once, read many" was occupied by CD-R discs.
Of course, at some point the prices dropped, and eventually some people ended up owning a dozen USB sticks of various sizes and shapes, some of which used for archiving, but none of them labeled.
To be fair, there were some USB sticks (that did not have much success) by PNY that had a (clever) open/close mechanism that made it into a rectangular shape with a paper label on one side where you could write (only 2 lines).
Underrated point here. Floppies at least usually came with sticky labels so you could tell them apart.
With flash drives, If you're lucky, you get a colour assortment in the box.
I bought a packet of 5x16Gb drives, and I can't tell which ones are the "partitioned strange for use with a vintage machine" versus "my brother's backups".
I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
I mean to add, the article says that thumb drives are still hot and the market will grow by billions a year more in a few years, but... I haven't used a thumb drive in years. The only time I actually went to look for one was to plug it into a shitty digital picture frame, and that one would also accept SD cards.
I still use the higher end ones (which have a USB SATA controller and a bona fide SSD) to carry photos and big files around when I'm on vacation. They look like bulky, yet ordinary USB flash drives.
Yeah, online file sharing sites of various types (dropbox, box, google drive) have basically replaced the USB stick in most cases. It's simpler to upload and send someone a link than find the stick.
Funny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop.
20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
Newer photo booths connect to your device using a WiFi hotspot to transfer your photos. Last time all I did was scan a QR code that basically connected to a WiFi network and opened a Kodak page served by the booth.
I still make it a point to disable AutoPlay and AutoRun on every PC I possess.
No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
I love my laser printer. There’s something about looking at data on paper that I really enjoy. Store it in a binder to look at later. Hang it on the wall to think about. I look at screens enough already. I don’t mindlessly print stuff off but important stuff like soil tests etc. I’d rather have a physical copy than go search for it electronically.
And not to mention, with some printers, you can feel the letters on paper as if there's some embossment. It gives a more tactile feel to the work you produced.
Yeah. I'm not a particularly heavy user of paper but I sometimes print something out to refer to it on a call, print out a recipe, print out a map, etc. Paper is just easier sometimes and I couldn't imagine taking the 30 minutes it would take me to go to the nearest Staples to get something printed out. And laser printers don't dry out like inkjets.
I bought a printer about a year ago and I use it all the time. There is definitely something nice and convenient about having a physical copy that you carry with you.
I needed some info when I was playing a video game, so I looked it up and printed out the excerpt that I needed. I could have just loaded it on my phone, but then I'd have find the page again whenever I needed it, and try to avoid all the stupid ads.
I agree with you 100%. That's why I bought a 10" Boox Eink tablet last week - to read real print without maintaining a printer. The PDF reader the thing comes from supports PDF annotations, and it comes with a Wacom pen, so I can continue to highlight and scribble.
"Sorry the audio buffered and cut out there, apparently the guest wifi and my cellular backup are both congested. If y'all would set your phones to airplane mode we might be able to get better audio quality..."
It's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them, except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them).
If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
I've still got a brand new box of floppies in my desk as we've still got test equipment that has floppy drives. The equipment is still top notch and modifying it to swap in a USB floppy emulator will ruin the calibration so I just keep my USB floppy drive and a well used floppy in my bag. Despite the outdated media format, our equipment is future proof. The files and formats they all use are plain text files with a somewhat standardized data format along with PNG or GIF image formats. In addition, the equipment all have GPIB interfaces which are kind of a pain to use but they all use the same API and there's a very good chance you can swap two boxes decades apart and still use the same commands to get the same measurements. When I started my career, I was a little upset at being given such outdated looking equipment (1990s desktop white, floppy drives, AT keyboard connectors, 10base2 Ethernet!) but shortly realized that care was taken to ensure that no matter how old the equipment looks, data can still be pulled into a modern computer in file formats that will never be outdated.
By the late 00's you were as likely to have a Zip drive for smaller (100mb) exchanges... if it weren't for the excessive licensing fees for the disks, the fate of the devices might have been a lot different. I really didn't consider thumb drives worth my time until they started getting over 256mb or so, I think it was also after USB3 was a thing, but it's a bit muddied in my memory.
Not everybody had a Zip drive and having to transport the entire drive added a lot of bulk. By the time USB 3 hit the scene we were well beyond 256mb. The original iPod Shuffle was basically a USB 2.0 512MB flash drive with an MP3 player bolted on and that was $100 in 2005. I think by then 256MB was probably under $50.
Oh, man. Any place you may want to bring that zip disk was already clicking, and you were just lucky that you listened it destroy somebody's else disk before you put yours on.
The way to share data was CD-ROM. Everybody had one or two rewritable disks with random stuff on them. But you could use neither the zips nor the CDs for some stuff.
Zip disks were earlier, in the 1995-2005 decade, by the end of 2000's they were already going towards obsolescence.
After the 100 MB, there was the 250 MB and later even came the 750 MB.
In my experience they were very handy/useful, particularly for backup use, but they were seriously troubled by the click of death issue.
USB 3 came well after 2/4/8 GB USB (2.0) sticks were common enough, USB 3.0 started becoming a common thing around 2010 or later, around 2004/2005 a common USB stick would have been 256 or 512 MB, in a couple years they quickly grew to 1/2/4/8 GB minimum.
For years I've only used them for OS installs on personal machines.
At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...
It is still today the fastest way to move large amount of data around.
If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20 min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps, then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25 Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail a thumb drive faster.
In my experience, it can be faster to figure out how to plug two computers together with a direct Ethernet cable and set up static networking and run netcat or a Python simple HTTP server to transfer such large amounts of data, than it is to copy it onto the crappy slow USB thumb drive that I have in my keychain.
Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb drive!
Depends strongly on the drive, with a lot of variance, and seedy vendors.
You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4) connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way restricting traffic, etc.
With most computers, the front ports may or may not be the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older device/interface, etc.
I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3 umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess.
All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally much faster depending on the port used.
10gbps and 20gbps USB M.2 enclosures are dirt cheap. I use one (with a 1TB SSD inside) as a flash drive. You can also buy USB SSDs that are smaller than M.2 enclosures but have the full SSD feature set (SMART data, TRIM, etc) just like enclosures.
It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most use cases.
Recently I have been using it to print color printouts from Staples self service. They have an email to printer option too, but sometimes the files are too big for email, and I don't want to keep deleting them from my sent emails folders.
I have one on my keychain I can use in a pinch to move files somewhere. It's come in handy a few times, but generally I prefer sending a link or such.
But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal. Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a big deal for people in the very poor countryside.
That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
I actually went through this yesterday! I opened a new (still in plastic!) box of HD “floppies” to make a bootable disk for my 486. I sent a picture of it to a friend and he replied “how big are these? 512k?”. I too thought it was common knowledge, the number 1.44 burned into my brain forever, but I do give my friend credit for being at least in the right ballpark, and also to come up with another number that has geek value.
Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so.
I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us
Actually 5.25" were usually 360 KB, the 1.2MB came later, just like 3.5" floppies, they were originally 360 Kb, then 720KB, only later they became 1.44MB:
Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).
For all the complaining I do about USB's naming standards—"Full Speed" is not in fact "full", it's slower than "High Speed"—I don't remember having the same gripes about Double Density vs. High Density :)
The first computer I bought was a 386. But I tried the used machine market before, to see if it was possible to save some money.
My father drove me to a company that had their used system for sale. It was embedded in a desk, the screen was minuscule.
I don't know what impressed me more: that when I asked (politely, looking for a reason to walk without offending the seller) how much memory it had, they started counting bytes included in the manual, or the 8'' floppies. Those were big.
Pretty sure thats double density, the bigger ones were HD for high density. You could usually format a good floppy for either if the cutouts were made.
There were basically never any 5.25" or 3.5" single-density disks on the PC, and the definition of double-density varied depending on disk size.
5.25" disks were 40 track, 9 sectors per track with 512 byte sectors for 180KB per side. For 3.5" disks, the definition was 80 track so 360KB per side.
High-density increased the number of sectors per track to 15 for 5.25" (600KB per side) and to 18 for 3.5" (720KB per side).
I can't stop myself from doing this all the time with music. I'll constantly realize things like, "Smells Like Teen Spirit is older today than Sgt. Pepper was when Nevermind was released."
My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the oldies station, and how that music was ancient! And here I am with an understanding that—to them, listening at that time—the music was just "a few years ago".
I think an article about removable storage would have been written similarly two decades ago. People do forget things or didn’t take note of them at the time.
For example, I remember a lot of things about the Commodore 64, but I don’t remember the capacity in bytes or blocks of its floppies. Also, I sort of remember that Amiga floppies were 880k after formatting, but I had to look it up just now to confirm.
I've only ever seen a IBM PC/2 with a 2.88MB drive, never actually saw a disk though.
I remember seeing something about floppies and how the technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the circumference was larger) never was implemented.
I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.
I guess this was one of those "inventions" which are pretty obvious in hindsight, and I bet more than one party had already though of building a USB drive, it was just a question of the USB interface becoming widespread enough and of flash memory becoming affordable and reliable enough. Actually, flash memory cards with proprietary interfaces were available for some time before the year 2000 given in the article (Compact Flash since 1994, Sony's Memory Stick since 1998), so it was just the question of using USB instead of these interfaces.
That reminds me, I don't remember if it was USB 1 or 2, but at some point I added a card to my PC that added two USB ports. I think that must've been USB 2.0 because the sockets were blue and I'm fairly sure I could hook up my keyboard and mouse through USB already.
Yes, I think the use of the term "invented" as well as the idea that the invention was unfairly copied are a bit disingenuous. Credit where credit is due. Pulling together the different technologies and making them into a manufactural product is a great accomplishment. If there were inventions involved it would be the USB protocol, there mass storage specification, and of course flash memory. The thumb drive just brought those things together.
It should also be noted that one of the reasons thumb drives took off when they did was not just due to USB.. as technically USB has been around for a few years and there were things like CF card readers coming on the market, and other flash storage readers a few years earlier.. so why did it take until later? Because Win 95 and Win 98 did not have plug and play drivers for USB mass storage devices, at all. I think it wasn't until Win98SE (edit: for true generic controllers it may have been Win2K even?) that there was a USB driver for generic thumb drives. But theoretically the tech was around and could have been implemented as early as 1996.
> Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification
Back in the day, some of my friends called thumbdrives MSDs, because when you plugged one in, Windows would show a popup telling you that it found a new USB Mass Storage Device. I don't recall that initialism catching on with anybody.
Hmm, I remember still having to install individual drivers for USB thumb drives/sticks on our stock 98SE install. It was only until we "upgraded" to WinME that USB mass storage largely became plug-and-play.
(Though, I think you could grab the winme usb drivers and plop them into a 98 install to get universal-ish usb mass storage, and later drives just ended up bundling a generic driver instead of a device specific one on the driver CD)
I remember that and I also remember as well some thumb drives that went ahead an emulated a CD-ROM drive in another partition with the driver installer.
After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.
I still remember the first time I ever saw a thumb drive because it was in a spy movie, The Recruit. Immediately went looking for where I could find one.
98SE still needed driver installation for every stick. It was WinME that included the first mass-storage generic class drivers.
These were then backported to 98SE, and pretty much every vintagecomputing enthusiast with a 98 box is running this despite the anachronism, because authenticity is just such a massive PITA.
I think it may have been a mix. There was also a mini CD thing around that time that sometimes got used for drivers. In general, things were switching over to CDs in the late 90s but as I recall floppies were still around for some purposes.
ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet access was pretty common by then.
I got a mini-CD the other day with drivers for a new USB-C Ethernet dongle. I almost laughed out loud. I have a couple of external CD/DVD/BluRay drives around. But it's been a long time since I had an internal CD drive.
Sometimes. I recall early thumb drives didn't come in the small blister packs you see by cash registers today. If they didn't come with a CD (or miniCD) you had to go the the manufacturer's site and download the drivers.
Even the worst versions of windows has engineers working on low level iterative improvements, far detached from the product level people who are fucking up the big picture.
Long time ago but I think, as a normal Windows 95 or Windows 98-using consumer, upgrading to Windows ME was almost certainly easier and less disruptive. In spite of the criticism it got at the time, Windows ME worked fine for most people.
I had some involvement with Windows 2000 from a professional product perspective--was even at the launch event--but don't think I ever seriously ran it as a desktop OS.
Windows ME still had the same loading sequence as Windows 95/98. That is, DOS kernel booted and then loaded the Windows code. Now it is true that Windows 95 and above mostly bypassed DOS once it was loaded, and DOS was used as merely a boot loader. And Windows ME made that more hidden. But you could still extract a DOS version out of ME (open a command window, use "format /s", then copy the various DOS command executables from the one directory to the floppy). You could then use this to boot DOS, and type "win" or something like that to load Windows ME.
Netac still holds patent globally until 2019. Other manufacturers paid Netac more than 2 billions over these years.
Made in China has changed a lot of things. It doesn't matter who really invented thumb drives. I think the first mass production/sale of thumb drives happened in China. That's the reason the patent was granted to Netac.
I am the proud owner of an 8MB IBM branded DiskOnKey flash drive.
Plugging it into my linux system, it throws a lot of errors, but I do have a ext2 filesystem on it. I can mount it and find the little 'hello world' text file I put in there last June :)
8 MB..and here I'm sitting, filling a whopping 1 TB USB-storage with ISO-files for live-system, most probably bigger than a whole PC had available, at the time DiskOnKey was sold. That was just 20 Years ago. It's those little things which reminds me of how insanely fast technology moved in my lifetime. Who knows where we will be in 20 years...
I had a couple of those IBM 8MB drives - they were a lot larger (physical size) than anything since. I didn't even know USB storage was a thing until they included them in the box with some Thinkpads. Compared to floppies they were amazing in terms of speed, capacity and convenience.
Maybe they're not tracking any personal data? The ePrivacy Directive ("cookies law") is years older than GDPR and only requires notification not consent.
Sites which choose to store zero PD (which includes e.g. not logging IP addresses) are GDPR compliant automatically, but still need to notify about cookies if using them.
edit: though, having looked at their privacy policy it seems they do use PD... so yeah, not good (unless I'm misunderstanding their tracking policy which I don't think I am) https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html
I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB.
I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a file around sneaker net. You'll note that the USB plug is on a short cord - the places where I had to plug it in didn't always allow for easily inserting a short rectangular stick - they either stuck out too far for where the computer was or required moving other things out of the way. This one let me plug it in with minimal obstruction to other things in a cluttered USB port area.
I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while, because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.
In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD drive.
EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.
----
[0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to read back the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever way to make money".
It's been years since I've done that. But I still keep a stack of USB sticks that I bought (or got as freebies from conferences) some 8-12 years ago, some of which have enough space for a Windows or Linux ISO to fit.
Create a FAT32 partition on your SSD/HDD, unpack your .iso there, and you should be able to boot from it. You typically don't have to mark it as an ESP partition. It works on most motherboards, but not all.
They've been popular around here for listening to music in your car for a very long time. Modern cars usually accept USB sticks as is, but there aren't many modern cars here since we're mostly using 10-15 year old leftovers from more developed countries. So people have been using cheap Chinese USB-to-AM-radio converters like this one:
Oh, I forgot about those. People still use those where I live (Poland), though Bluetooth streaming is becoming more popular. But it doesn't mean they're necessarily buying new sticks - 10 year old ones work just fine.
Or, some do as I do, and just play music straight from the phone speakers.
That's one application that never made sense to me. It's like an idea to use SD cards with paper printers - you'd want to connect directly with a cable, or hook it up to LAN/WLAN, on the first available opportunity.
I get that 10 years ago, back when I was in this space, this was a consequence of DIY builds being Arduino-based - SD cards were the easiest form of durable storage to work with, and the alternative was streaming G-code over USB, which tended to cause unreliable prints (my favorite example was a 3D printer builder and a popularizer in our local Hackerspace, who figured out he can't leave a print job running and give the computer to his kid to play videogames on, because any larger load would slow G-code transmission rate, throw off timings, and completely ruin the print). But I would think these days the printers would be built with some on-board buffer storage and network connectivity. ESP32 is a thing.
I think people don't want the printer in the same room as their computer. If it's noisy or you have the smell of melting filament, that's not a pleasant experience.
Network-attached might work, but that probably complicates the device UI substantially-- some way to bind it to a WLAN, possibly even set up non-DHCP network configuration.
There's an existing package - OctoPrint - that you install on a Raspberry Pi and connect up to your 3D printer that can provide a web interface for just about any 3D printer on the market, so you don't have to shuffle files around on SD cards or stream G-code from your local machine. They provide a disk image that you can flash so it's more or less plug-and-play. Still need an SD card for the Raspberry Pi though. :)
I want to use an SD card for my printer in case Windows decides to self-update, despite me setting it to not do this automatically, and I don't want to fail in the middle of my print. Hosting the GCODE can also cause issues if your computer lags a bit. The printer will sit, with a hot nozzle dripping plastic below, until the next command arrives. This shouldn't typically be a problem, but sometimes systems can lag hard, and who wants a needless blob of filament on the surface of their print?
I don't know what you'd need a USB stick for anymore, but SD cards (especially microSD cards) are still useful for onboard storage for cameras and portable gaming devices (Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck).
You're probably not using them to transfer files between desktop or laptop computers anymore, but they have their place with more specialized devices.
I'll buy a new one whenever I'm at Microcenter because they are so cheap. I don't keep any important data on them, they are really just for making boot disks or transferring data between non-networked machines. I've got this one USB 3.0 flashdrive that I've have for years that for some reason I've yet to lose. The 3.0 interface is busted but the 2.0 interface works fine. If I'm using a 3.0 port, I have to very gently insert it so that the 3.0 pins don't make contact. I hate that flashdrive but it's the only one I can seem to find when I need one asap.
I still use them regularly, and will buy one if one breaks or something like that. I use cloud storage most of the time but frankly I don't trust it completely for privacy as well as access reasons, and my storage needs would be pretty huge, so I backup files on a flash drive as a kind of second backup. I also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as they take up much more space and I don't lug them around. I can fit a flash drive in my coat pocket when I'm traveling, and so forth and so on.
I guess I just like redundancy, having control over my own physical storage, have a sort of backup routine (cloud for super frequent temporary storage, flash for less frequent more capacity, and SDD for even less frequent even higher capacity) and flash drives are super portable. I tend to buy them in the biggest fastest format I can, and pay extra for a brand name from a vendor I trust.
I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
> I also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as they take up much more space and I don't lug them around. I can fit a flash drive in my coat pocket when I'm traveling, and so forth and so on.
This may be a more recent development, but I was recently buying an external SSD for my in-laws, and current options on the market are ~credit card sized (though thicker) and store a terabyte. It's already small enough I'd worry about misplacing it, but also small enough it would fit in my coat pocket, and there surely are smaller options.
I'm like you wrt. controlling my own physical storage - it's just repeated bad experiences with USB sticks and SD cards that made me reluctant to ever spend money on them ever again. Even with SD cards, I just reuse the few good ones I got some 6 years ago (there's one I use for phones, and a few I got sitting inside Raspberry Pis).
> I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
Same here - if I use my phone in this role, it's strictly temporary, just to transfer data between machines. Space on the phone is precious - in my experience, no matter how much of it you have, it will mysteriously disappear somewhere within a year, leaving you with a phone barely capable of storing recent photos and few apps before it starts choking due to lack of space...
(I say somewhere because I really have no idea where - on my Android phones, the "storage use breakdown" in settings feels like it never adds up.)
I started buying m.2 drives instead because they've gotten super cheap and are almost the same size. The main reason is even the crappiest m.2 drive has acceptable write performance but many USB drives are unbearable. I bought a little m.2 dock, I wish the enclosures weren't all expensive.
> I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.
You can validate flash media with f3[1] on Linux/Mac or H2testw on Windows. These tools will fill up the drive with data, then verify that it all reads back properly. This ensures the drive meets the rated capacity and doubles as a sequential read/write test.
I assumed it was invented when a developer cut down an edge connector breadboard and shoved it directly into the USB port then et voilà it's a development board.
In 2022, can Windows (or Linux?) defend themselves against an USB drive that contains a virus?
If you go to some service that offers prints and use your usb drive there, Im like 100% sure you will get multiple viruses.
I dont understand why the operating systems dont seem to be able to defend themselves against it. Also in the past the drives had a "read only" mode, nowadays this is hard to find.
In 2015 on a reality TV show about inventors (Americas Greatest Maker created by Intel and Mark Burnett) I pitched two phones sharing battery power (reverse wireless charging).
In 2018 Huwaeii was the first to introduce into the market via their Mate 20 Pro. Samsung added it a year later in a Galaxy Phone calling it "Wireless PowerShare." Their been rumors Apple will add it too.
I've always wondered if my pitch on that TV show to Mark Burnett(creator of the voice, survivor, shark tank, etc) & Intel was the spark for it all or they'd been working on it prior. I would hope Intel created some patents around it as overall it was just idea I pitched on recorded video for the show to Mark and folks at Intel.
I'm not a mechanical or battery engineer rather a web developer. Would be cool to see if my idea (was at a tech event & phone died yet was surrounded by tons of powered up devices) was the first that sparked reverse wireless charging.
The strange thing about the thumb drive world - I can remember getting my first one in the early 2000s, capacity of 4MB or so I think. The odd part is I have no clue what brand it was, where I got it from, or how I heard that they existed. I vaguely recall it being some no-name vaguely sketchy seeming thing. But it worked great.
I remember buying my first thumb drive. I think it was in 2000 or so, and it cost $75 from Staples. It had a whopping 128mb of storage, which at the time felt massive. I used it for years until eventually it was lost.
> The Iomega Zip Drive, called a “superfloppy” drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.
I've heard or read a few stories about the Zip Drive recently and they all seem to compress the 10ish years of existence and completely downplay it's impact or significance.
In 1994 a 1 GB SCSI drive cost over $1000 the largest IDE drives were about 250 MB, new PCs were shipping with 130 MB drives and 486 CPUs. If you need more than 1.44 MB of removable storage you chose between a tape backup and the rarer more expensive Bernolli drives; both requiring a SCSI interface. Tape drives were relatively inexpensive, slow and didn't do random access; reading or wring everything serially and it took hours to restore files. Bernolli drives were expensive and unreliable; the fail state was a damaged drive head.
I remember having an Irwin 40 MB tape drive that I used to backup games from my 100 MB Western Digital HDD. While tape was slow, it was still faster than installing Wing Commander or Papyrus Nascar Racing from 2 dozen floppy disks. It was also unattended unlike floppy.
When the Zip Drive arrived in 1994 it offered 100 MB of external storage in similar capacities to comparably priced tape drives for similar prices. It was random access like a floppy disk and you could read off of it rather than having to copy the files to your HDD like with Tape. It was also much faster and the parallel port version could be hot swapped without rebooting.
CD-Rs wouldn't be a thing for a couple years, they wouldn't be affordable for a couple more, and they wouldn't be reliable for a couple more. Initial drives didn't come with buffers and needed high performance machines, later buffered drives could still underflow if your PC couldn't keep the buffer filled. Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process. Everyone had a spindle of failed burns. Even when CD-Rs and CD-RWs finally arrived, they were slow. The ZIP drive was comparable to an 8x CD-ROM and those speeds for R/RW were still years away.
For a 6 year period after the initial 100 MB drive launched, the Zip drive was a big deal. I don't know what their definition of "widespread popularity" was but Iomega was huge for a time and quietly died off in the early 2000s.
When Iomega launched the Zip 250 in 1999, ZDNet wrote [0]:
> "...Iomega is poised to expand its already massive share of the removable storage market."
> "The biggest name in removable storage just got bigger thanks to the Zip drive's increased capacity--it now holds a generous 250MB of data."
The 750 MB version wouldn't arrive until 2002 as a last dying gasp from Iomega in an attempt to compete with CD-R/RW.
right around that time I remember, I was carrying 2GB HDD as a removable thumb drive - to exchange music/apps with friends.
Exciting times, when I prepared a careful and curated directory of music and apps to share with my friends and connecting drive via HDD could be possible even online, while PC was running.
> Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process.
"You think that's bad?" We had to literally watch the burn process. Walk away and it would fail.
Took a while to realise it was the vibrations of the wooden floor that would kill the burn process if you didn't sneak away very carefully..
1) Tape drives, at least the common 1/4" cartridge types from folks like Wangtek and Adaptec, came with QIC-36 or QIC-02 PC interfaces before SCSI. Lots of those were sold. It was nice when the SCSI ones became common, since you didn't have to have a separate controller board for your tape. The cartridges were cheap (relatively), but the drive/controller certainly wasn't. Reliable, tho.
2) If you had the right software, tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning. Not random access, but it allowed you to 'fast forward' to the files you were interested in. Saved tons of time, but definitely not as good as a ZIP.
3) Many of the 'micro tape' drives from folks like Irwin (DC1000?) were as often as not attached to the floppy controller. Still better than swapping floppies.
And I had a ton of external ones that were parallel port attached. I didn't see a lot of SCSI ones, but they surely existed. Not so reliable in my experience.
4) Tangentially, there were at least 2 vendors that attached 9-track tape drives (the big reel to reel ones) to PCs, and at least 1 that attached a VCR as a tape drive. Neither took off.
5) For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive. To the extent that if I saw someone with some ZIP drive a reasonable ice-breaker was "so are you an artist?". Unbeatable combination of capacity, speed & cost relative to disk drives, as long as you had good backups.
> tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning.
I remember that being a big deal but I don't think I encountered that until about 1999 when I was working help desk for a small IT shop. I don't really have a good frame of reference, I picked up my Irwin Tape Backup ~1995 from a computer salvage store and I downloaded the software from a Bulletin Board.
> For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive.
That was my experience too. I worked at Office Max for a time and most clients who brought work into the Copy Max copy center would do so on either Zip or Jazz. I remember them having a PC solely for PC formatted Zip Disks to transfer to a Mac.
The earliest I recall seeing a USB thumb drive was early 2000s maybe 2003. Staples then or a year later had 45MB thumb drives on sale I think $50). People went nuts over this deal. The cashier asked the elderly woman buying one if she wanted the protection plan for it. I probably still have the one I bought.
One interesting fact about thumb drives is that they have evolved significantly since they were first introduced. The first thumb drives were created in the late 1990s and were much larger and less reliable than the ones we use today. They were also much slower, with data transfer speeds of only a few megabytes per second. In comparison, modern thumb drives can transfer data at speeds of hundreds of megabytes per second and are small enough to fit on a keychain. This has made them an essential tool for many people, and they are now commonly used to store and transfer data for personal and professional use.
> with data transfer speeds of only a few megabytes per second
That sounds high to me; some of my more recent USB drives get single-digit MB/s. USB 1.1 had a theoretical limit of 1.2MB/s and I doubt many (any?) early thumb drives achieved that.
189 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] thread> Multiple individuals have staked a claim to being the inventor of the USB flash drive. On April 5, 1999, Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems, an Israeli company, filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk".
More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.
Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16474735
Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g. Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress support on their recent models of higher priced camera systems). Prices are very high, but that's justifiable IMO - unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up with the performance and endurance that professional equipment demands.
[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicursam...
[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicmulti...
I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.
Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but every part of the experience saw a dramatic improvement after I switched to a higher-spec SD card.
I'm more concerned with the reliability (in my experience). The middle-priced ones are not necessarily better than the cheapest ones.
> Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve
I'm not asking for 1000 MB/s write speed. Why do I still sometimes get 10MB/s in 2023? Is it much to expect around 100 MB/s write (HDD-level speeds) in most "average" thumb-drive?
Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.
The quality of these things has really gone down as they've gotten commoditized, it seems.
People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at the time.
Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.
(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)
So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!
Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.
There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.
Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it wherever I went.
Of course, at some point the prices dropped, and eventually some people ended up owning a dozen USB sticks of various sizes and shapes, some of which used for archiving, but none of them labeled.
The case/mechanism was similar to this:
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-6bkt1ygjlf/images/stencil/60...
but they were sold in boxes of 10 or 12, I cannot remember if they were 1 or 2 GB capacity.
EDIT:
found an actual picture of them:
http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/wp-content/gallery/pny-third-...
they were 2 and 4 GB.
With flash drives, If you're lucky, you get a colour assortment in the box.
I bought a packet of 5x16Gb drives, and I can't tell which ones are the "partitioned strange for use with a vintage machine" versus "my brother's backups".
20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.
No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
I needed some info when I was playing a video game, so I looked it up and printed out the excerpt that I needed. I could have just loaded it on my phone, but then I'd have find the page again whenever I needed it, and try to avoid all the stupid ads.
They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
The way to share data was CD-ROM. Everybody had one or two rewritable disks with random stuff on them. But you could use neither the zips nor the CDs for some stuff.
After the 100 MB, there was the 250 MB and later even came the 750 MB.
In my experience they were very handy/useful, particularly for backup use, but they were seriously troubled by the click of death issue.
USB 3 came well after 2/4/8 GB USB (2.0) sticks were common enough, USB 3.0 started becoming a common thing around 2010 or later, around 2004/2005 a common USB stick would have been 256 or 512 MB, in a couple years they quickly grew to 1/2/4/8 GB minimum.
At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...
If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20 min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps, then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25 Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail a thumb drive faster.
Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb drive!
You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4) connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way restricting traffic, etc.
With most computers, the front ports may or may not be the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older device/interface, etc.
I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3 umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess.
All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally much faster depending on the port used.
It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most use cases.
Sometimes, it's just easier to SneakerNet that chongus mass of "the most important data ever".
My car has a usb drive with my favorite music.
But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal. Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a big deal for people in the very poor countryside.
That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us
Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at 512KB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance...
Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).
https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-...
My father drove me to a company that had their used system for sale. It was embedded in a desk, the screen was minuscule.
I don't know what impressed me more: that when I asked (politely, looking for a reason to walk without offending the seller) how much memory it had, they started counting bytes included in the manual, or the 8'' floppies. Those were big.
5.25" disks were 40 track, 9 sectors per track with 512 byte sectors for 180KB per side. For 3.5" disks, the definition was 80 track so 360KB per side.
High-density increased the number of sectors per track to 15 for 5.25" (600KB per side) and to 18 for 3.5" (720KB per side).
My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the oldies station, and how that music was ancient! And here I am with an understanding that—to them, listening at that time—the music was just "a few years ago".
I think an article about removable storage would have been written similarly two decades ago. People do forget things or didn’t take note of them at the time.
For example, I remember a lot of things about the Commodore 64, but I don’t remember the capacity in bytes or blocks of its floppies. Also, I sort of remember that Amiga floppies were 880k after formatting, but I had to look it up just now to confirm.
I remember seeing something about floppies and how the technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the circumference was larger) never was implemented.
I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.
The USB physical form-factor and electrical signals were 1996 but the protocol for storage devices appears to be later in 1998:
Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification Overview V1.0 Revision October 22, 1998 : https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/usbmassover_10.pdf
Back in the day, some of my friends called thumbdrives MSDs, because when you plugged one in, Windows would show a popup telling you that it found a new USB Mass Storage Device. I don't recall that initialism catching on with anybody.
(Though, I think you could grab the winme usb drivers and plop them into a 98 install to get universal-ish usb mass storage, and later drives just ended up bundling a generic driver instead of a device specific one on the driver CD)
After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.
These were then backported to 98SE, and pretty much every vintagecomputing enthusiast with a 98 box is running this despite the anachronism, because authenticity is just such a massive PITA.
https://vetusware.com/download/Universal%20USB%20Mass%20Stor...
In case you're in the market for such a hack. :)
ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet access was pretty common by then.
Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.
I had some involvement with Windows 2000 from a professional product perspective--was even at the launch event--but don't think I ever seriously ran it as a desktop OS.
Windows 2000 was absolutely the OS to have until MS tightened XP with SP2.
Made in China has changed a lot of things. It doesn't matter who really invented thumb drives. I think the first mass production/sale of thumb drives happened in China. That's the reason the patent was granted to Netac.
Sites which choose to store zero PD (which includes e.g. not logging IP addresses) are GDPR compliant automatically, but still need to notify about cookies if using them.
edit: though, having looked at their privacy policy it seems they do use PD... so yeah, not good (unless I'm misunderstanding their tracking policy which I don't think I am) https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html
Even between the same brand, one drive can be great, the other is slower than dirt (even with USB 3), is unreliable, etc.
https://imgur.com/2XcXCPe - its 128 MB.
I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB.
I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a file around sneaker net. You'll note that the USB plug is on a short cord - the places where I had to plug it in didn't always allow for easily inserting a short rectangular stick - they either stuck out too far for where the computer was or required moving other things out of the way. This one let me plug it in with minimal obstruction to other things in a cluttered USB port area.
In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD drive.
EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.
----
[0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to read back the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever way to make money".
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771224597.html
(first result on aliexpress, I have no idea if it's any good or not)
Or, some do as I do, and just play music straight from the phone speakers.
Photographers.
I get that 10 years ago, back when I was in this space, this was a consequence of DIY builds being Arduino-based - SD cards were the easiest form of durable storage to work with, and the alternative was streaming G-code over USB, which tended to cause unreliable prints (my favorite example was a 3D printer builder and a popularizer in our local Hackerspace, who figured out he can't leave a print job running and give the computer to his kid to play videogames on, because any larger load would slow G-code transmission rate, throw off timings, and completely ruin the print). But I would think these days the printers would be built with some on-board buffer storage and network connectivity. ESP32 is a thing.
Network-attached might work, but that probably complicates the device UI substantially-- some way to bind it to a WLAN, possibly even set up non-DHCP network configuration.
You're probably not using them to transfer files between desktop or laptop computers anymore, but they have their place with more specialized devices.
I guess I just like redundancy, having control over my own physical storage, have a sort of backup routine (cloud for super frequent temporary storage, flash for less frequent more capacity, and SDD for even less frequent even higher capacity) and flash drives are super portable. I tend to buy them in the biggest fastest format I can, and pay extra for a brand name from a vendor I trust.
I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
This may be a more recent development, but I was recently buying an external SSD for my in-laws, and current options on the market are ~credit card sized (though thicker) and store a terabyte. It's already small enough I'd worry about misplacing it, but also small enough it would fit in my coat pocket, and there surely are smaller options.
I'm like you wrt. controlling my own physical storage - it's just repeated bad experiences with USB sticks and SD cards that made me reluctant to ever spend money on them ever again. Even with SD cards, I just reuse the few good ones I got some 6 years ago (there's one I use for phones, and a few I got sitting inside Raspberry Pis).
> I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
Same here - if I use my phone in this role, it's strictly temporary, just to transfer data between machines. Space on the phone is precious - in my experience, no matter how much of it you have, it will mysteriously disappear somewhere within a year, leaving you with a phone barely capable of storing recent photos and few apps before it starts choking due to lack of space...
(I say somewhere because I really have no idea where - on my Android phones, the "storage use breakdown" in settings feels like it never adds up.)
You can validate flash media with f3[1] on Linux/Mac or H2testw on Windows. These tools will fill up the drive with data, then verify that it all reads back properly. This ensures the drive meets the rated capacity and doubles as a sequential read/write test.
1: https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
If you go to some service that offers prints and use your usb drive there, Im like 100% sure you will get multiple viruses.
I dont understand why the operating systems dont seem to be able to defend themselves against it. Also in the past the drives had a "read only" mode, nowadays this is hard to find.
In 2018 Huwaeii was the first to introduce into the market via their Mate 20 Pro. Samsung added it a year later in a Galaxy Phone calling it "Wireless PowerShare." Their been rumors Apple will add it too.
I've always wondered if my pitch on that TV show to Mark Burnett(creator of the voice, survivor, shark tank, etc) & Intel was the spark for it all or they'd been working on it prior. I would hope Intel created some patents around it as overall it was just idea I pitched on recorded video for the show to Mark and folks at Intel.
I'm not a mechanical or battery engineer rather a web developer. Would be cool to see if my idea (was at a tech event & phone died yet was surrounded by tons of powered up devices) was the first that sparked reverse wireless charging.
https://youtu.be/0QYcgwjUlWo
I've heard or read a few stories about the Zip Drive recently and they all seem to compress the 10ish years of existence and completely downplay it's impact or significance.
In 1994 a 1 GB SCSI drive cost over $1000 the largest IDE drives were about 250 MB, new PCs were shipping with 130 MB drives and 486 CPUs. If you need more than 1.44 MB of removable storage you chose between a tape backup and the rarer more expensive Bernolli drives; both requiring a SCSI interface. Tape drives were relatively inexpensive, slow and didn't do random access; reading or wring everything serially and it took hours to restore files. Bernolli drives were expensive and unreliable; the fail state was a damaged drive head.
I remember having an Irwin 40 MB tape drive that I used to backup games from my 100 MB Western Digital HDD. While tape was slow, it was still faster than installing Wing Commander or Papyrus Nascar Racing from 2 dozen floppy disks. It was also unattended unlike floppy.
When the Zip Drive arrived in 1994 it offered 100 MB of external storage in similar capacities to comparably priced tape drives for similar prices. It was random access like a floppy disk and you could read off of it rather than having to copy the files to your HDD like with Tape. It was also much faster and the parallel port version could be hot swapped without rebooting.
CD-Rs wouldn't be a thing for a couple years, they wouldn't be affordable for a couple more, and they wouldn't be reliable for a couple more. Initial drives didn't come with buffers and needed high performance machines, later buffered drives could still underflow if your PC couldn't keep the buffer filled. Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process. Everyone had a spindle of failed burns. Even when CD-Rs and CD-RWs finally arrived, they were slow. The ZIP drive was comparable to an 8x CD-ROM and those speeds for R/RW were still years away.
For a 6 year period after the initial 100 MB drive launched, the Zip drive was a big deal. I don't know what their definition of "widespread popularity" was but Iomega was huge for a time and quietly died off in the early 2000s.
When Iomega launched the Zip 250 in 1999, ZDNet wrote [0]:
> "...Iomega is poised to expand its already massive share of the removable storage market."
> "The biggest name in removable storage just got bigger thanks to the Zip drive's increased capacity--it now holds a generous 250MB of data."
The 750 MB version wouldn't arrive until 2002 as a last dying gasp from Iomega in an attempt to compete with CD-R/RW.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001119014500/http://www8.zdnet...
Exciting times, when I prepared a careful and curated directory of music and apps to share with my friends and connecting drive via HDD could be possible even online, while PC was running.
"You think that's bad?" We had to literally watch the burn process. Walk away and it would fail.
Took a while to realise it was the vibrations of the wooden floor that would kill the burn process if you didn't sneak away very carefully..
I haven't heard that one. Did you have one of those HP CD Writers with purple button and no buffer too?
1) Tape drives, at least the common 1/4" cartridge types from folks like Wangtek and Adaptec, came with QIC-36 or QIC-02 PC interfaces before SCSI. Lots of those were sold. It was nice when the SCSI ones became common, since you didn't have to have a separate controller board for your tape. The cartridges were cheap (relatively), but the drive/controller certainly wasn't. Reliable, tho.
2) If you had the right software, tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning. Not random access, but it allowed you to 'fast forward' to the files you were interested in. Saved tons of time, but definitely not as good as a ZIP.
3) Many of the 'micro tape' drives from folks like Irwin (DC1000?) were as often as not attached to the floppy controller. Still better than swapping floppies. And I had a ton of external ones that were parallel port attached. I didn't see a lot of SCSI ones, but they surely existed. Not so reliable in my experience.
4) Tangentially, there were at least 2 vendors that attached 9-track tape drives (the big reel to reel ones) to PCs, and at least 1 that attached a VCR as a tape drive. Neither took off.
5) For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive. To the extent that if I saw someone with some ZIP drive a reasonable ice-breaker was "so are you an artist?". Unbeatable combination of capacity, speed & cost relative to disk drives, as long as you had good backups.
I remember that being a big deal but I don't think I encountered that until about 1999 when I was working help desk for a small IT shop. I don't really have a good frame of reference, I picked up my Irwin Tape Backup ~1995 from a computer salvage store and I downloaded the software from a Bulletin Board.
> For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive.
That was my experience too. I worked at Office Max for a time and most clients who brought work into the Copy Max copy center would do so on either Zip or Jazz. I remember them having a PC solely for PC formatted Zip Disks to transfer to a Mac.
That sounds high to me; some of my more recent USB drives get single-digit MB/s. USB 1.1 had a theoretical limit of 1.2MB/s and I doubt many (any?) early thumb drives achieved that.