Endless Paradigm

After the death of my old USB thumbdrive, I've been using my portable HDD these days, to carry stuff around.

But yeah, it's larger, and has moving parts...  so I decided to buy a new USB drive, seeing the prices of them now dirt cheap.

Got myself an 8GB cheap/generic brand (my experience with generic brand USB drives aren't that bad - sure, they're not the fastest, but usually reasonable).
But this one has absolutely horrible write speeds...  It's like USB 1 speeds.  Copying from the drive feels more like USB 2, but seriously, double you tee eff?

Urgh, oh well.  It didn't cost that much anyway.

yeh cheap ones always read slowly

im using a 2.5inch 40gb laptop hd in a really small usb powered case

Well cheap drives are always slow but the question is can you live with it,

I'm guessing you use your thumb drive a lot so it may be worth buying a better one further down the line at some point,

I'm still using my MP4 player as my portable HDD but I don't use it that much so speed is not an issue,

My sister's generic one doesn't run that slow... Mine's Kingston, and it is faster than hers, so I guess there is a difference.

Anyways, I really need to get a bigger USB. Mine's currenty 1GB, and these days often I run out of space. And carrying a spare DVD-RW around (what I started doing like 2 weeks ago) isn't fun. It's really cheap these days anyways.

Sounds like mine, except mine is 4gb.

Yeah, I probably should've gone for a 4GB Kingston - around AU$22-$25 from memory, whereas the 8GB I got was AU$38.  Just thought 8GB would be more useful.

It's read is okay, so it's not too bad I guess.

i had a 2gb Sony drive die on me about 2 months ago. i wasn't really expecting that from something made by sony. shortly before realising the drive was dead i had done a reinstall of xp on my computer because it was all fudged up. the drive had a load of downloaded programs (legal of course) on that i hadn't yet backed up. that meant i had to try and remember all the stuff i had downloaded for that computer and then trawling through the interne for hours finding and downloading everything again. also i hadn't kept the recipt for the drive so I'm now stuck with a useless drive that i can't replace.

now i use a small card reader with the 8Gb Seagate ST1.2 Drive from my dead mp3 player for my portable data storage (its like a CompactFlash shaped hdd). its not the best solution as its read and write speeds are awful, it has moving parts, i have to carry a small usb lead with me to use it and the plastic casing of the card reader is really fragile and I'm constantly guing the whole thing back together.

or one could go for a Solid State hdd...
http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/re...e-Drive/p1

i added an ini file to autorun an icon file
then have the icon and ini set to hidden
now i get this when i use my 2.5inch 40gb hd through usb


im thinking of making some chibi stickerz to add to the drive

Managed to send it back in.  Probably should've asked for a refund, but they offered a replacement instead (the store's technician tested it out, and agreed that it was unbelievably slow).

Oh well, it's only $38, and I'm interested to see what the outcome is, after the manufacturer sends something back...