OK, there are tons of these things on the market with varied price ranges. Are they all basically the same, or are there some brands that should be avoided? Is this a "get what you pay for" type of item, or can I get by with the cheapest one? I'd hate to lose some important info because of a crappy USB drive...
i have a nice cheap 128 and it works great. So far I haven't encountered any problems with quality. My only regret is that I didn't buy a bigger one. Alot of times with a mail in rebate, you can get a larger one for the same price.
to me they all should be the same. I have had a 64MB USB 1.1 Stick for more than a year and a half, and havent had any issues with them. You can get them pretty cheap now and most even have a MP3 player with them.
A better deal is to get a 20gb notebook harddrive and a USB 2.0 adapter for it. It costs as much as a 1gb pen drive.
Thats the way to go, i did the same with my DVD burner and paid only like $130 total for the Burner and external enclosure.
One of the commodities I'm responsible for at work is the USB Disk on Key, or flash drive. Since there's no moving parts, you shouldn't have any electrical issues. Mechanically, as long as you don't subject the device to excess random shock and vibration, you should be fine. Fry's sells the 128MB sticks for like $40.
We got one a month ago to store files from a computer we were donating to charity. It worked like a charm. Of course, I haven't tried to extract the files from the stick either...
go to www.ecost.com but make sure the usb jump drive is "usb 2.0" and pay attention to the transfer rates...most are 100mb/sec, but there are still some 2.0 that are 1mb/ sec..you dont want those.
I bought an SD card reader that was the size of a flash drive for about $30. So I pull my SD cards from my Palm or my digital camera. Then I can use all my SD cards. It's the ultimate in flexibility. Jump Drive Trio is the brand. I'm really happy with it. Why pay for memory if you already have SD cards? The only complaint is 9x machines need a special driver. XP and 2000 are flawless plug-n-play.
I bought a Scandisk 256Mb USB2.0 FlashDrive from dell last year. Only costs me $42. Normally it will be $50 even after rebate.
The other thing you want to be wary of is eCost has a reputation for "accidentally" sending refurb stuff as new.
Really? Everything I buy at eCost.com is advertised as refurbished to begin with. I've been more than pleased with all of my purchases from them. Of course, I've never bought anything brand new from them... so this post was useless I guess.
