I bought a 256GB 3.2 Kingston Data Traveler
Cloud storage is fine for backups.
I need fast speeds for Smooth Audio and Video playback.
Read Speed up to 200MB/s
Write Speed up to 60MB/s
Fits my requirements. That’s assuming the pc has a modern usb-c port.
I’ve bought Kingston flash drives since 2004. Back when 10GB was a big drive and expensive.
The physical size of this drive is shocking. It’s literally half the physical size of flash drives we bought 2 or 3 years ago.
It’s no wider than the usb port it plugs into and not much thicker than the plug on a usb cable.
It’s so small that I put it in a ziploc sandwhich bag. Otherwise it would get lost in the bottom of my desk drawer with the chapstick, pens, and AAA batteries.
Imho it’s too damn small. It gets lost in your pants pocket.
No, I will not hang it from my keychain. My keys hitting it all day long would damage the flash drive. The keychain threading thru the plastic eyelet would eventually break the eyelet.
They’re much too easy to loose now. You’re doomed if its on your desk and gets covered in papers. Or falls down in thick carpet.
Your cat will love it as a chew toy. Your dog will swallow it in one gulp.
Some objects require a certain size to be useful.
Imagine someone handing you a Fork or Spoon three inches long.
It doesn’t matter if 256GB fits on a **8 millimeter square microchip. It needs to be in a case size that’s easy to carry without loosing it in a deep pocket.
It’s not like giving something a bigger case than it needs is not done with a lot of other electronics. I totally see where you are coming from.
That said, I have not had any trouble finding any that are the same size as the older ones. I have two beside me, one I bought a few months ago.
For your case, I would recommend the practical idea of buying a super tiny little port extension, and plugging your drive into that. Or, yeah, just go buy a new drive of the right physical size, if that’s cheaper.
I still have the 128MB thumb drive that I got in 2002. It still works. I used it for many years as a backup for my Quickbooks file but the file got too big for it a couple of years ago.
That Kingston form factor has been available for many years. I have some old 8GB drives that look like that, which I bought in 2016, and some similar 4GB drives that I got sometime before 2014.
I was at walmart last night and they stock flash drives in the older style case size that I prefer.
I still have several smaller capacity Thumb drives that I bought 15 to 20 years.
I haven’t bought a new Thumb drive in several years.
I bought this 256GB Kingston Traveler primarily for movies. I wanted to bring a dozen or more on a road trip vacation. Most of mine on my cloud are around 6 to 8GB. They are legal backups from my dvd’s.
I have an old zippered headphone case that I use for nail clippers, small bottles of imodium & Tylenol, and other small items on trips. The Kingston Traveler will have a home next to the suppositories. Kind of fitting since the inconvenient small size is a PITA.
I much rather carry a flash drive in my shirt pocket. I’d have to remove my shirt to get this small one out of my pocket. It would end up lying sideways in the bottom of the pocket.
I’ll look for a 6 inch cable that that can plug into the laptop usb port and the flash drive. An attached cable would make the flash drive easier to find in a drawer or on my desk.
Remember when they were called Thumb Drives? We had Sneaker Net at work. I had several install files for antivirus, CCleaner, malware bytes, Adobe PDF reader, and The most current Windows update on my Thumb drive. I used it to update staff computers. Much faster than downloading the same files three dozen times.
i quit doing that when install files changed and got tiny. They did nothing except start the download of the software. Defeating the purpose in having the software on the Thumb drive.
Thumb drives fell out of the language and Flash drives is the common name now.
For y’all’s amusement. When I saved this ad about 25 years ago, it was already antique, but now it’s a true dinosaur. (And yet… I was 37 years old in 1985…)
My first pc was a NCR. Linked is the ad I saw. The clincher was; they ran a sale if the customer brought in an old typewriter as a trade-in.
I bought a ancient typewriter at Goodwill for $15. I don’t remember how much the sale cut the cost. Maybe a $100?
The ad is for CGA color. That was a high dollar option in 1986.
As @ThelmaLou pointed out, the hard drive option cost almost as much as the computer.
I came home with a monochrome pc and floppy drives. I added a “hard card” a few years later. It was a expansion card with the disk controller and drive. Worked really well.
And here I thought I was old school, trucking around my 1GB thumb drive from circa 2006. Someone bought it for me as a gift, and it’s a little nicer than it needed to be as a functional matter (ie: it’s got leather lining with stainless steel casing and a lanyard to be worn around the neck) meaning it stands out from the higher-capacity drives I’ve accumulated over the years and allowed to just sit in various boxes and desk drawers at home as random junk. I keep it in my office and use it when we have an internet problem that makes it impossible to scan/email documents to myself (I can insert the thumb drive and scan to drive, then insert into my computer).
Yeah, my first Real Computer (1995) had a 540 MB hard drive.
I’ve seen some thumb drives that have two USB plugs, one A and one C. That seems like a good idea, because there are a lot of devices around still that only have A. And it’d also force the physical casing to be a bit larger.
My first job as an engineer was with a company that manufactured hard disk drive components. This was in 1990. Maxtor was selling a breakthrough drive that was 100MB for $99. The first product that was less than $1/MB.
