USB Sticks

[MediocreMetastasis]

I thought this was a kinda silly issue to have until I started considering putting a demo of my game on usb's to give out in conventions if I ever set up a stall. My game demo would probably be at most 100mb so buying 100s of 16-32gb usb's in bulk would be a huge waste of money.

I have checked and there's a local company that ships as low as 32mb usb's in bulk. But it doesn't seem you can buy 32mb usb's as a consumer.

[Loebas]

Honestly, bring back the 1-4 GB USB drives, and make them USB3 as well. Because flashing a 1GB Linux ISO via DD to a 64GB USB drive seems very wasteful. (Ventoy does not always work. )

This is the reality at my dayjob.
We use a disk sanitization suite at work that provides a live linux environment that we use to wipe the devices from our clients. Normally you boot the devices using PXE.

But there are times this is not possible (e.g The device only support UEFI), then you have to use a USB drive with the image flasshed to it. The images they provide are ~1/2GB in size.

Their instructions say that you need to flash the ISO using balena etcher, or Rufus (using DD mode). Leaving you with 63/62GB of space you cannot use.
And this is the time where i would love to see USB3 drives that are just 2GB in size (the USB3 to decrease boot times), so i can flash the images on one of those.

Heck even <1GB USB2 drives would be awesome to store my documents, and other small files.

Also a petpeeve from me is that USB dives dont have a industry standard form factor, i would love to see this

[Dan Q]

I like a pendrive to have a size and weight that physically represents what's going onto it; does that count? Like, a really important file probably belongs on a weighty, metal pendrive; a small file belongs on one of those dinky little fingernail-sized drives, and so on.

I remember some art project once where somebody made a pendrive that "inflated" itself as it filled-up, to give a physical "feel" to the device to represent how full it was:

I sometimes wonder what it'd take to make one that appeared to "fill up" with liquid? Like: it'd use a "magician's glass" trick to pump a coloured fluid from a concealed container within the body into the walls of a plastic test tube?

[MediocreMetastasis]

I sometimes wonder what it'd take to make one that appeared to "fill up" with liquid? Like: it'd use a "magician's glass" trick to pump a coloured fluid from a concealed container within the body into the walls of a plastic test tube?

There's doll toys where a milk bottle prop magically fills up with liquid, but it turns out the inside is almost hollow and the cap stores all the liquid. I can see how you could possibly let water through a valve into a see through part of the usb by detecting how much storage is left. Getting it back in on the other hand...

[Dan Q]

There's doll toys where a milk bottle prop magically fills up with liquid, but it turns out the inside is almost hollow and the cap stores all the liquid. I can see how you could possibly let water through a valve into a see through part of the usb by detecting how much storage is left. Getting it back in on the other hand...

Yeah! That's the kind of thing I mean!

So I'm thinking: if you could build a plunger into the "storage" bit that would "push" or "pull" the fluid into and out of the walls. Powered by some kind of low-speed, high-torque motor (running off the ~5V or whatever you can reliably draw from a USB port). A bit like how a syringe works!

The biggest challenge might be powering the motor in such a way that the liquid can't leak into it. Possibly it could be a self-contained unit within the pendrive, powered by induction from a coil within the outer casing? Although that's probably going to get pretty hot...

...ooh, "getting hot" gives me another idea! A small heater inside a pendrive could power a tiny lava lamp and a light. The heater would run whenever the drive was powered, but the brightness of the light would indicate how full it was, or how hard it was working?

(My microelectronics skills are really bad: I can just about solder a USB connector together but I wouldn't know where to start with any of these wacky ideas. They're just fun to think about!)

[PurpleHello98]

I only really have this problem with ISOs, like Loebas said. I recently had to download some drivers off the Internet Archive for my Mac mini when i installed Windows XP, and the ISO with just the drivers was only 1GB, so it felt a waste burning it to a 4.7GB DVD. If it's just regular files, I don't care that much, although I don't normally get big USB drives anyways. I keep all my files on my computer's hard drive, since all of my computers have at least 160GB hard drives---the only reason I keep something on a flash drive is if it's a current project I need to access from my laptop and desktop, and potentially a public library/Internet cafe desktop!

Actually, for that I use the Windows briefcase, which is really useful. You create it on the flash drive and drag files from your home PC into it, and then you can modify the files on either that PC or on something using the flash drive, and then synchronize the copies with each other the next time you plug the USB drive in, no matter which one you've updated. I do this because I use my iPod nano in disk mode as my main flash drive these days since I only have a few text documents I need on the go, and in case it corrupts or something and needs to be reset I don't want to lose my important files. They got rid of the briefcase with some update to Windows 10, though, which I think was really stupid. Their excuse was that cloud storage is a thing---that doesn't mean every computer user can or should use it!! Plus, even non-Windows computer or computers on newer versions of Windows recognize the briefcase on the flash drive as a simple folder, so as long as you use an older Windows OS as your main OS (like I do) you're good to go.

[AY38910]

The larger the better, I store a fuckton of shit on them. Yes, even a full DOS install in one of them.

[candycanearter07]

...ooh, "getting hot" gives me another idea! A small heater inside a pendrive could power a tiny lava lamp and a light. The heater would run whenever the drive was powered, but the brightness of the light would indicate how full it was, or how hard it was working?

(My microelectronics skills are really bad: I can just about solder a USB connector together but I wouldn't know where to start with any of these wacky ideas. They're just fun to think about!)

I've seen a ton of drives that had a little LED flash when active, so it wouldn't be super hard to hook that up to a heater maybe? I really like the physicality of these ideas though :D So much tech is boring and adding some whimsy back in is a great idea

[wolfkitty42]

I love USB sticks! I don't really care about the size of the file.... Right now I am primarily using two usb sticks. One of them stores my photo album, and the other stores my convention pictures and is always plugged into a digital picture frame.

I have an old camera card for a broken camera- IIRC it was SUPER small, so I've got that for tiny things... I also have an mp3 player that is unfortunately not functional, but does a fantastic job at basically being a storage device. I've been using it to transfer music, mostly.

I love all the whimsical ideas for usb sticks in this thread!! I would EAT a lava lamp stick up so much! I don't think I would like the inflating stick, because the size change would suck for storage....

[cinnamuff]

USB sticks my beloveddd!!! I actually have a slightly-not-normal amount of them in my space, most of them are from back when I learned about backing up my art on flash drives since our family computer at the time was always at risk of getting a BSOD plus a multitude of other problems that'd cause us to reset the whole thing. I lost a lot of art during that time and if it weren't for me uploading pretty much everything I drew digitally to deviantART, It'd be lost to time...

Since I was a teen at the time who didn't want to lose their art files like I had in the past or delete them, once a flash drive ran out of space, I'd acquire a new one that was larger in space, copy everything over, and continue from where I left off. I started with a 16GB one, then a 32GB, then 64GB. I cycled through the 64GB drives here and there up until I acquired a 500gb external SSD once those became affordable. So.. I don't use them much anymore now since SSDs are so convenient right now. (Though I kinda wish they were more durable.. I have flash drives from 2013 that are still kicking somewhat haha!! their age is definitely showing)

But even though I've moved on from using USB sticks as a means to work from, I still use them for transferring files to and from my desktop and laptop, if I need to print I use them to hold files until I get to a print center, and I also flashed Linux Mint and Linux Lite to a couple when I was giving Linux a go on my old laptop! 

As far as types of USB sticks... personally, I don't like retractable ones since I find them hard to retract haha, but they feel wayyy more durable than the ones that swing open.

[Dan Q]

As far as types of USB sticks... personally, I don't like retractable ones since I find them hard to retract haha, but they feel wayyy more durable than the ones that swing open.

The best "retractable" one I ever had was a double-ended retractable one. The USB headers were contained within the body, which could be retracted one way to expose a USB-A plug, or the other way for a USB-B Micro plug. This looked cool and was useful for carrying important stuff like my password safe and cryptographic keys around in a way that I could plug into most computers or into my phone.

Of course, nowadays my phone has a USB-C port. And an increasing number of small computers have no USB-A ports. So when I replaced it, I looked for something similar, but with USB-A and USB-C "ends". I didn't find one that I liked, and in the end I just went for a USB-C one with an A-to-C adapter tied to it.

Something I do like in a pendrive is a large, metal hole that I can thread a keyring through. That way I can attach it to my keys or my wallet. Not a small hole that I can only get a metal thread through: those break. Not a plastic hole that will snap the body of the pendrive when any torque is applied to the ring. Large. Metal.

[Gizmo]

What do you mean people aren't using USB flash drives anymore? I've always just assumed they've become quite standard in recent years as far as storage backups go. What are your other friends using to store their files, then? Or do they just simply not even care at all about making backups of their files and let them get lost upon replacing their device?

That also reminds me that I need to go down to Staples to purchase some flash drives so I can make backups of all the files on my current laptop and to also have one I can use for dual booting Linux when it's plugged in.

I'm also in college and from my experience most people either rely on the default cloud provider their computer / institution provides (eg: OneDrive), or they don't back up their files at all.

As for me, I'd prefer to have a 2 or 4GB USB drive for the aesthetic and efficiency, but not enough for me to actually replace the 32GB one I already have.