I Am Impressed
Posted by Phoenix Woman on October 10, 2009
Taking a quick break from this blog’s trying to save a nation from corporafascism (which nation, I will leave up to you), I just wanted to let you all know that I love the fact that my 8GB flash drive made it through my washer and dryer and still works like a charm. (I’d tell you the brand, but I don’t want the FCC coming after me for illicit quid pro quo or whatever.)
Try that with any other digital storage medium!
16 Responses to “I Am Impressed”
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MEC said
Dayum. Good thing.
I have it on good authority (someone else’s experience) that cellphones don’t survive that experience.
Charles II said
Aren’t there better ways to clean up databases?
Phoenix Woman said
I’m just tickled at the thought that something smaller than my thumb has the computing power that my hard-disk-equipped desktop did a decade ago — and is a heck of a lot sturdier.
MEC said
I’m tickled that USB drives are now large enough to back up all my files. It’s so much faster and simpler than backing them up to a DVD.
Stormcrow said
It completely boggles my mind, because when I got started in this business, just over 20 years ago, a 300 MB drive cost more than $1000, took up more than 300 cubic inches of space, and weighed several pounds.
And systems shipped with drives whose capacities ran into the tens of MB. My first Unix system shipped (August 1988) with a system drive whose capacity was a mere 91 MB.
It’s been four or five years now, and I still freak out a little when I contemplate my latest thumb drive, a 64 GB monster.
That’s more data capacity than my old 2003 Dell shipped with. I just retired that system about 8 months ago, and the drive was replaced less than 2 years ago!
Mark Gisleson said
Was there any data on it, and did the data survive?
If the data survived, I have a 500GB USB drive that just failed. Can I use your washer and dryer?
Phoenix Woman said
Yes and yes, without a scratch.
500GB USB? Holy crap, that’s bleeding-edge technology!
Charles II said
What, no Ethernet?
Mark Gisleson said
Ethernet? For the printer. Firewire for the five fast hard drives, and USB for a legacy drive.
Piracy is very high tech now, you know.
Charles II said
That’ll teach me to sass the sysop.
Stormcrow said
USB maxes out at a practical rate of 25 MB/second, regardless of what salesfilth will tell you. They’ll tell you 480 mbits/sec, which about 48 MB/second and the theoretical maximum for USB 2, but you’re not going to see that anywhere this side of Never-Never Land.
25 MB/second is about 1/3 the maximum transfer rate of a reasonably modern drive. Manufacturer’s spec for a Seagate ST3750640AS asserts a sustained transfer rate of 78 MB/second. I tend to credit the Seagate spec here, since I have measured these up to over 68 MB/sec sustained.
Takeaway? If you want fast, get eSATA.
Stormcrow said
Hard drive, of course.
Mark, examine the case it was in. Does that case make any provision for active drive cooling?
If not, then sight unseen, I’d consider the case as the number 1 candidate for a failure root cause.
I’ve already had to retire a 250GB WD USB drive myself, for exactly that reason. And I have the smoking gun: the PCB off the drive, with the molten goop that shut the drive down still bridging the connectors of a surface-mounted IC chip.
That’s why I stopped buying prebuilt USB drives.
These days, if I want a USB or eSATA connected outboard drive, I buy the case separately from the drive, and assemble it myself.
The case is the most likely failure point if it does not actively cool the drive. 99% of the outboard drive cases on the market are crap for this reason alone. And this is also true of about 99.9999% percent of the cases on prebuilts.
Mark Gisleson said
It’s a LaCie in a Porsche case. I’ve had it at least three years. But I did fry it once. Forgot to pull the blinds and it sat in direct sunlight until it failed. Put it in the freezer and it worked OK again.
I’m thinking I should put it back in the freezer even tho solutions I don’t understand scare me a little.
Stormcrow said
Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I figured.
Here’s a piece at flickr.com: Disassembling Lacie Porsche Hard Drive. Looks like a simple metal box, without any provision for drive ventilation or cooling whatsoever.
There are better cases out there.
The Antec MX-1 has a proprietary fan in a “paddlewheel” configuration on one side of the case. It circulates air in a loop around the drive, and the hot air exhaust is through a grille on the other side, near the rear of the case.
The Thermaltake Max 4 also has a side-mounted fan, but this one blows air straight in through the side. The hot air exhaust is done through a mesh front panel. I don’t know whether its fan is a stock 80 mm fan or not.
I have an older LaCie case, designed for a 68 pin SCSI drive kicking around somewhere. The only reason I keep it is to evacuate data off of obsolete SCSI drives. It’s pretty much the same can of worms as that Porsche case: no provision for drive cooling whatsoever.
If I didn’t have to worry about doing data Dunkirks off of old 68 pin SCSI hardware, I’d junk it in a heartbeat.
Optimum would be a case which actively cools the hard drive with an industry standard fan. I had a chance to review why “industry standard” needs to be there just last night. When I had to change out a failing fan in an IDE inboard disk rack. It was a standard 40mm x 10mm ball-bearing fan, so changing it out once I had the rack enclosure in my hands took less than 5 minutes. With hardware in my spares bin, since the fan was not a proprietary design.
Stormcrow said
I’ve heard of this sort of thing before, but the rationale escapes me.
I never just put one of these in my pocket, unless I’m going to be away from my desk and I have to be concerned about theft.
I’d be worried about crud getting into the USB connector, or the connector getting bent or otherwise dinged up, even if the drive were one of those rubber-encased “Flash Voyager” drives.
I pack mine around in a purpose-built USB drive carrier. About 3″ x 4″ square and about 3/4″ thick. Holds 6 of the things and it’s zippered. That, I’ll put in a bag.
But just leaving a USB drive naked to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune would scare the hell out of me.
Phoenix Woman said
It’s kinda-sorta protected by the curved hunk of metal that holds the lanyard, but that was obviously no barrier to water, suds and drying heat. (The dryer is probably what saved it, by drying it out before the water could do it permanent harm.)