I like the look of these Micro Center drives. I recently bought a 5-pack of 64 GBs for $23. (I already had a 256 GB in the same design.) But for my search for smallest, I’m only looking at ones that are naked circuit boards with no metal sleeve around the contacts.
Is it possible to just strip the housing off of a regular flash drive?
My first job as an engineer was at a company that made components for hard disk drives. In 1990 Maxtor made history with a 100MB drive for $99. It was the first time the $1/MB barrier had been broken.
Last week I bought a five pack of 32GB thumb drives that came to $2.89 each. That same $99, or close to it, will get you 8TB.
Micro SD card with a tiny holder is the smallest I can think of. Mine is under 2 inches.
Great article, thank you.
Not to nay-say it, but I’ll point out the article is now 11 months old.
So real 2TB drives are out there. Still pricy, like >USD150. But actually available, as opposed to being obviously impossible scams regardless of price.
Funny aside:
I just did an Amazon search for >=2TB thumbdrives. Then I sorted the results by price from high to low. Hoping to identify the probably-real ones near the top and not have to wade through pages of obvious fakes first.
What was interesting /funny to me is the search results started with a page or two of results with no price shown and instead “not currently available” in that slot.
Which suggests that in Amazon’s algorithm, a price of NULL or NAN sorts high.
I don’t think that there are. Not in “thumb” cases, that I’ve seen. They could be made (it wouldn’t be much of a modification for something like this drive, for example), but I can’t find one that actually exists.
Looking at amazon again now I’m not seeing the legit-looking ones I saw a hour or two ago. And “legit-looking” and “legit” are admittedly two very different things.
I’m definitely not an expert here, so I’ll bow out. Not annoyed, just have nothing more useful to add.
If price increases with scarcity, I can see a superficial logic that “unavailable” is a high price. It’s impossible to believe that it’s not deliberate for some reason, but I can’t think why. I’m wondering if buyers pretty much never use a high-to-low sort, but somehow it’s useful for sellers?
I suspect it’s an artifact of low-to-high. They want to sort unavailables at the bottom of that most common sorting scenario to get them out of the way. They didn’t really think of the consequences for the negative case.
[quote=“Bullitt, post:11, topic:980331”]
Okay, all kidding aside, I’ve had one of these on my key chain and in my pocket every day for a couple of years. It has no moving parts and has held up very well. It just takes a lickin’ and keeps on ticking. In my pocket and on my key ring, it does get beat up.[/quote]
Don’t most USB flash drives lack moving parts?
Some have a port that is retractable. Some have a USB-A plug on one end and a Micro or C on the other, accessable by sliding. Some have a rotating cover. Some fuck your computer.
That’s true. I was imagining USB flash drives with little motors, gears and cams to move the bits around.
There is a version with no storage, if you just want the fucking.
Unless it’s a scam - maybe it comes with 2TB storage and no fucking.
How about that for a trivia question - why is somebody selling a flash drive with no storage capacity?
Those have been around for a long time–here is video from 16 years ago. The memory-free versions came first as a novelty USB item, like canons and coffee warmers.
I’m surprised there aren’t 2TB flash drives. You can get 1TB MicroSD cards, and it would be easy to fit two in a typical (or even reduced) USB stick, complete with the controller.
(I actually thought 2TB microSD cards were out, but apparently not yet.)
We barely have 1.5 TB for now.
I think there’s a non-zero probability that the drive in your link is legit (unlike the AliExpress link). It’s about the price it should be, and the pics are not obviously Photoshopped. I’d go for it.
PNY used to have a line of drives that were almost that small–the business end worked the same way and squeezed inside the port, but it was longer overall (which at least meant it had a keychain hook). Doesn’t look like they make them anymore.
If this really is for funsies, there’s always this:
It fits even more snugly into the port, has a hole for your keychain, and has a microcontroller to boot! Only 64 kB of storage, but you can’t have everything, right? On the other hand, you can use it to emulate a keyboard, and have it occasionally type in the commands to transmit sensitive documents to yourself. Just stick 'em in any important-looking computer you find and no one will be the wiser.
The typical target audience for that kind of drive in the OP are for the ones working with Arduino or Raspberry, where a smaller size for memory is looked at. In a Raspberry that I set up, the USB and SD memory were not going to be removed, the “bigger thing” to store them was the Raspberry itself. (As one can see in one of the pictures in the Amazon link in the OP.)
I still have a 128MB thumb drive that I bought in Taiwan in 2002. It still works perfectly.
Mine is gas powered.