[NTLUG:Discuss] External Hard Drive Recommendation

[Steve Baker]

Joel Sinor wrote:

> One of the gotchas I have
> heard that is os-agnostic is the fact they are using flash memory for
> storage.  This is typically slower than traditional hard drives and also
> has a more limited life span.

Yes - there is definitely a life-span issue.  Depending on the flash chips
they are using, they will 'wear out' after maybe 100,000 writes.  The
Cig at r drive that I have *claims* to be good for a million writes - but I'm
not sure I believe that.

Thus, it's wise to use them only for things like file transfer...don't
do things like repeatedly editing a file that's on the memory stick.  Especially,
don't run programs that continually update files on files stored on the stick
or you can wear out the drive in a very short time!

There is an argument for not deleting files from the stick until you need
the space so that it gets used uniformly.  I don't know how valid that is.

I always copy all the files off the flash, do any work - then copy them
back onto the stick again.  I've been using the same stick in this way
several times a day for over a year now - with no problems so far.

The speed of the Cig at r is about a half Megabyte per second when writing and
a little faster when reading.  I see they now have a 1Gbyte version available.

I really use mine as an alternative to burning CD's or (god forbid) using
floppies to move files around.  You can boot some PC's from the USB drive,
but that's not something I've tried.  You could fit a pretty decent Linux
distro into a 512Mb memory stick!

> It appears these devices do not exactly work like usb drives, but as far
> as they do, they work fine in Linux.  My opinion is it is a good idea to
> find one people report being able to use in linux first.

Well, the Cig at r drives seems to work pretty well with SuSE 8.x and GenToo without
any special software installed on the machine. The FAQ says it needs a 2.4 or
later kernel.

    http://www.cigarusb.com

The only odd thing we've encountered is that when you plug a specific memory
stick into your PC, it is assigned a drive descriptor (/dev/something-or-other)
and if you unplug it and plug in a DIFFERENT memory stick (same manufacturer, etc),
it allocated it a new drive name.  Hence, if dozens of people in your workplace
have these things and they all plug them into the same PC at one time or another,
it's likely that you'll run out of drive names or something.

However, if there are just a handful of these devices that may be plugged into
a particular PC, there are no problems that I'm aware of.
---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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