Thursday, January 6, 2005

Flash Drive -- 2:29 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A while back I read Ars Technica's review of several flash drives. I broke down the other day and got a 512M SimpleTech Bonzai Express. It was rated highly in that review and was dirt cheap at Sam's Club ($44.79). When that article was written, the 256M version was going for $80! It's nice not to have to burn a disc just to tote some files around. It's more convenient and, with USB 2.0, a lot faster. 512M guarantees that I'll be able to tote just about anything my little heart desires. It worked right away in Linux with a quick and painless addition to my /etc/fstab.

When I tried to plug it into the front ports on a WinXP box, it locked up solid. There must not be enough juice getting to them. Thankfully the back ports worked fine. That taught me the hard way that WinXP's FAT32 filesystem is not any better than Win98's filesystem at recovering from hard resets. I guess ext3's journalling system has spoiled me. On the rare occasion that I've needed to hard reset my Linux box (mainly when my previous USB 2.0 card was freaking out on me), ext3 recovers the journals in the blink of an eye and the boot continues as if nothing happened.

The Master comments: That's why I usually recommend people not use FAT32 for their drives. It sucks. NTFS is much better. However, ext3 does not have to deal with the wonders that are the BSOD in Windows.

News for 01/06/2005

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