Are thumb drives still a thing?

[luv2liv]

i do digital signage (TV menus). the hardware of choice is the raspberry pi. just load the pi with files on the usb drive. perfect!

 

[whm1974]

Yeah USB thumb drives are way too useful to not be a thing anymore. What does the OP expects to do, store everything on the cloud, use the internet to transfer large amounts of files/data?

Seriously?

 

[ch33zw1z]

I use them for many different things, file sharing sometimes.

 

[Anubis]

Yeah USB thumb drives are way too useful to not be a thing anymore. What does the OP expects to do, store everything on the cloud, use the internet to transfer large amounts of files/data?

Seriously?

apparently

i mean id like to be able to just cloud everything but i don't have 100+ MB/s upload or download speeds

true story, its faster for me to thumb drive data and drive it 500 miles from facility to facility vs pushing it to a share drive at work

 

[whm1974]

apparently

i mean id like to be able to just cloud everything but i don't have 100+ MB/s upload or download speeds

true story, its faster for me to thumb drive data and drive it 500 miles from facility to facility vs pushing it to a share drive at work

I highly doubt the world's population, even in highly developed nations will have widespread and reliable very high speed internet anytime soon, if ever. Hence portable storage devices.

 

[zinfamous]

Thumb drives are out, flash drives are in.

 

[zinfamous]

Hard to get much faster and portable than an M.2 flash drive
https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-Enclosure-retractable-aluminum/dp/B075ZNCVJ5

You know, I thought I was making a stupid, pedantic joke up there^, but I now see that maybe there is a real difference between the terms....and now I want one of these super devices.

 

[Anubis]

You know, I thought I was making a stupid, pedantic joke up there^, but I now see that maybe there is a real difference between the terms....and now I want one of these super devices.

they are nice but you are limited by the USB interface and the drive you are copying data to/from

 

[zinfamous]

they are nice but you are limited by the USB interface and the drive you are copying data to/from

yeah, I did notice that. Was wondering what is the point of M.2/NVME if your interface is USB 3.1 or even less. I guess this affords you the "benefit" of grabbing the absolute slowest and cheapest M.2 drive with the largest capacity, because all of them are faster than USB 3.1 anyway, right? I guess the only thing to really consider then would be read/write durability.

 

[Zanovar]

Thumb drives are very handy.just saying

 

[Atreus21]

Oh snap, I've been looking for a USB adapter that supports 2280 NVMe drives, nice!

Doubt that would work with NVMe, unless I'm mistaken.

Just because it's M.2 doesn't mean SATA M.2 and NVMe M.2 are interchangeable.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I bought one not too long ago for just in case moments but I mostly use cloud/onedrive now.

 

[Kaido]

Doubt that would work with NVMe, unless I'm mistaken.

Just because it's M.2 doesn't mean SATA M.2 and NVMe M.2 are interchangeable.

Nope, you're right - no NVMe support Their wording was confusing, bummer.

NVMe stuff is a bit of a pain to support because you can't just pop it in a dock for recovery or formatting or whatever. I keep a mini desktop with a 2.5" boot drive & an open NVMe slot for doing maintenance activities on those types of M.2 drive. Bleh!

 

[Atreus21]

Nope, you're right - no NVMe support Their wording was confusing, bummer.

NVMe stuff is a bit of a pain to support because you can't just pop it in a dock for recovery or formatting or whatever. I keep a mini desktop with a 2.5" boot drive & an open NVMe slot for doing maintenance activities on those types of M.2 drive. Bleh!

Same thing we do, though we only have a handful of NVMe drives in the field. Usually reserved for users who need high performance stuff.

Our standard machines come with SATA M.2 drives.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't use them a lot but they are definitely handy for moving data from one physical location to the other when setting up something over a network may not be feasible. I like to buy really cheap 8GB ones too so when I need to give something to someone I don't have to worry so much about getting it back.

One thing I'd like to see though is bootable USB being more standard. Like it would be nice if you could burn any ISO to a USB stick and boot off it, but it's very hit and miss, some OSes support it, some don't. Some OSes also have specific USB boot images, but again, not all. It would be nice if it was just the same across the board. Most Linux distros do have it now, not sure about Windows, they tend to be behind with stuff like that.

 

[crashtech]

The Win10 1709 build iso burned fine to a stick using Rufus, seemed to be pretty standard procedure.