# USB Flash drives are getting ridiculously small and have large storage GB's **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 21, 2026, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867 "2026-02-21T05:51:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2026, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/41 "2026-02-21T23:59:37Z")
I’m running **FakeFlashTest (FFT)** against the Kingston Flash drive now. I paid full retail at Newegg. I don’t expect any problems. But, it can’t hurt to test. FFT only writes to selected areas. That still takes several hours on a 256GB drive. It could take over a day to test every byte. That’s not necessary to check for a fake ssd. That reminds me of wiping a drive. I used a program that ran three passes with different bit patterns. That was great for smaller drives. It became totally impractical after drives exceeded 60GB. Three passes would run for days. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/42 "2026-02-22T01:12:39Z")
I bought Steve Gibson’s SpinRite HD test/restore utility in the late 90’s. Recently got an email saying I could get the latest version for free. Started running the most intensive testing on a 1 TB drive. It estimated 2 weeks! ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/43 "2026-02-22T05:54:16Z")
Two things: My 486 had 4MB built in, I remember. And I just now looked at the pics and figured out how big the drive is. I have one like that that I bought with my new computer 6 years ago.       …and I lost it. (probably in the move to a new house.) ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/44 "2026-02-22T12:08:48Z")
@aceplace57 , if the flash drives you are finding are not good enough, or marginal, I suggest trying an NVMe drive instead, in an appropriate enclosure; that will do the trick. None of this 60 MB/s; we are talking more like reading and writing at a gigabyte per second. The people “reminiscing” about how their hard drive capacity was not big enough in 1952, or whatever, are perhaps revealing something about their age, but that information will not help you stream high-bandwidth, high-resolution A/V to portable solid-state recording media _today._ ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/45 "2026-02-22T13:08:06Z")
Your 1 TB hard drive’s firmware implements a number of diagnostic self-tests, and it definitely does not take “2 weeks”. Sounds like the software you got was worth what you paid for it. Or, more likely, there was some sort of misunderstanding, because SpinRite is not supposed to take that long. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/46 "2026-02-22T13:26:32Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > … > Even blastier from the pastier, in 1973 Professor Ed Fredkin, head of Project MAC at MIT and the originator of simulation theory, told my architecture class that someday memory would have been as cheap as a penny a bit. > Computation of the price of a bit of flash memory today is left as an exercise to the reader. I know you know this, but … Decent bet the prof was referring to the price of what we now call RAM, not permanent random access mass storage = current terminology disk, flash, SSD, etc. The price of both of those things is now many orders of magnitude below 1 cent per bit. But the two prices are also still a few orders of manitude apart. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/47 "2026-02-22T20:02:59Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > Your 1 TB hard drive’s firmware implements a number of diagnostic self-tests, and it definitely does not take “2 weeks”. Sounds like the software you got was worth what you paid for it. Or, more likely, there was some sort of misunderstanding, because SpinRite is not supposed to take that long. That was for the most intensive testing. For practical purposes, you don’t need anything remotely near that. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2026, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/48 "2026-02-22T20:47:21Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > The price of both of those things is now many orders of magnitude below 1 cent per bit. But the two prices are also still a few orders of manitude apart. The price of RAM today is a lot less than a penny a bit also, of course. Memory hierarchies were a lot different back then. The next year when I went to grad school each of us in our group got our own hard disk which we put into the drier sized disk drive. Not used for cache. When you mounted a disk drive, you physically mounted a disk drive! My laptop has 32 GB of RAM installed, or 256 Gbits. I don’t know how much of the price the RAM was, call it $200 to be very generous, so 20,000 cents.. So that’s less than a a tenth of a million cents a bit. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/49 "2026-02-23T11:21:33Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > > [@DPRK](#): > > > > Your 1 TB hard drive’s firmware implements a number of diagnostic self-tests, and it definitely does not take “2 weeks”. Sounds like the software you got was worth what you paid for it. Or, more likely, there was some sort of misunderstanding, because SpinRite is not supposed to take that long. > > That was for the most intensive testing. For practical purposes, you don’t need anything remotely near that. According to [this post](https://forums.grc.com/threads/understanding-spinrite-drive-processing-levels.1590/), the most intensive (“Level 5 - Exercise storage media”) testing on a 1 TB drive takes 29 hours. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/50 "2026-02-23T14:36:35Z")
> [@dirtball](#): > > have one of these full of music plugged into my car dashboard. I wanted something that sticks out as little as possible so as to reduce the need to be careful not to bop it in some damaging way. It comes into the house only when I want to switch music in and out, but it goes back to the car asap. It’s worked out pretty well so far. The stubby (dongle) flash drives are great for plugging into a TV’s USB. My Vizio tv plays movies or audio from USB. It’s great when our internet is down. The stubby is safer in case the tv gets moved too close to the wall. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/51 "2026-02-23T14:59:13Z")
> [@ThelmaLou](#): > > From a 1985 Tandy/Radio Shack catalog. That’s like $7,500 today. For 15 megabytes? Hot damn. Oh, wolfpup already pointed this out. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/52 "2026-02-23T15:08:30Z")
It was very rare for a home pc user to have a hard drive before 1988. They were too expensive. 5 1/2" Floppy disks were the the norm. It was different at corporate jobs. I still remember the excitement when 3 1/4 became available with more storage. My dept’s boss had a Word Processor with 8" floppys. I never used those. I remember seeing them in his office. I think that software was from the early 80’s. That was six to seven years before I got into data processing. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/53 "2026-02-23T15:11:12Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > It was very rare for a home pc user to have a hard drive before 1988. They were too expensive. > > 5 1/2" Floppy disks were the the norm. > > It was different at corporate jobs I’m a 90s kid so I remember USBs but only as a relic, CDs were king when I was a kid. I think I took a PowerPoint presentation about the Maya or about camels to school on a floppy disk in 2nd grade but that’s about it for practical usage. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/54 "2026-02-23T15:11:49Z")
I remember when a 16GB flash drive cost $39 but, with the blossoming of huge amounts of cloud storage, they are dirt cheap. I keep a bag of ten 32GB drives in my desk. I think they cost something like $19. That’s $2 a piece! LOL ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/55 "2026-02-23T15:35:19Z")
IMO the historical question before us is not what hard drives cost in 1985, it is when it began to make more sense to use flash storage for music production as opposed to HDDs and digital or analogue tape. Those in the biz probably have specific experiences in the matter. I see that right now a Pyramix system comes with a 1 or 2 TB M.2 SSD. ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/56 "2026-02-23T15:55:07Z")
Hell Microcenter routinely sends me coupons for free 128gb flashdrives, no purchase needed. I think I have like 5 of them now. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867/57 "2026-02-23T16:18:04Z")
My Mac II had a 20MB hard drive in 1987, but it was a beast of a machine. I added an additional hard drive soon after I got it - the hard drive price wars were in full swing, and I bought a Conner 40MB drive for $400. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usb-flash-drives-are-getting-ridiculously-small-and-have-large-storage-gbs/1027867.md?page=2)