Truelyscrumptious wrote:My old COBOL programs were on 8" floppys. At least I never used punch cards - LOL!

I worked on an inventory system - punched cards. 80 characters per card, 3000 cards per tray, 26 trays, a whopping 6+ megs of data. And the machine itself (Univac 1005) had 4K of memory, and it was the expanded version!

My last musical birthday card was probably more powerful...

uh yeah, because of the 3mb/s read and write speed.. Think the comment below your stated it would take 64gb 7hrs to fill at that speed.

SSD's have ridiculously fast read/write times.

What is wrong with Centon? Don't they realize that people like me lose the little caps for the USB stick? WHY CENTON WHY?!

When I travel, I put all travel related files (photos, journals, scanned brochures, etc.) on a souvenir keychain and attach a thumb drive. So far so good BUT I have twice lost documents on other drives when detaching and somehow bend the USB connection. I am since quite hesitant to use thumb drives at all. I could back up ALL of my photos on this and put in safety deposit box so using it over and over would not be a problem and I'll have offsite backup.

My first computer had a 250 Mega bite hard drive with 8 gigs of Ram. Cost around $4200.00

onerver wrote:My first computer had a 250 Mega bite hard drive with 8 gigs of Ram. Cost around $4200.00

Don't you mean 8 MEGS of RAM? You would have been able to store your whole hard drive in RAM 32 times over if you had 8 GIGS of RAM.

apctek1998 wrote:I have an old 20 MG hard drive and its as big as a CD Rom. just cannot trash it.

Open it up

The control boards from hard rives sell for about $10/lb on eBay [gold reclamation]...

The platters about a dime a piece [probably more for yours since they are presumably much bigger platters than in a 3.5" drive]

The magnets and the attached alloy brackets about $1 for the pair.

The case is probably aluminum, $0.40 per pound.

--
And I imagine that newer techniques has allowed the manufacturers to use less gold and platinum than what they did in the 80s, so your components might carry a decent premium...

Granted for one drive, it might not be worth the hassle of all that

That doesn't work for me. I had a slow drive once, and I hate when someone gives me files and we have to stand there forever just to get them copied. There are just too many occasions in which files can't be copied overnight.

I bought one of these last time they were here. It is sloooow. Frustratingly so.

But it is a good deal for 64gb that fits on a keychain. Decent for swapping a tv show or a few discographies with friends.

The things are rather durable too.

This is the bottom of the barrel for USB drives. I have the 32GB DataStick and it is really slow.

I don't think "it will work for most people" is an accurate statement. I use mine strictly for playing music in the car. About 20GB is filled up with tunes. It takes about 20 minutes for the car to index the files. With other drives like my sandisk it takes about 3 minutes.

I have had songs become corrupted on the drive, every now and then I will have wipe it clean and copy everything back over to it.

So yes, it works but I wouldn't ever use this drive to store something important.

I've never seen such low read/write speeds.
Maybe back when flash drives had just hit the market for several hundred dollars.

It's cheap, it works, but it is unbelievably slow. Even compared to drives with identical specs. I've had one for about 6 months and it seems to be getting slower. It took about 30 seconds to open a single page pdf. Either there is something wrong with mine, or it really is a cheap piece of junk. Around christmastime, I paid slightly more for a 64gb sandisk which honestly seems about 10 times faster.

I tend to stay away from any flash drive that has removable covers

rosen380 wrote: (snip)

Granted for one drive, it might not be worth the hassle of all that

I think the real problem is going to be finding someone who will buy the components of *one* drive.

martmann4 wrote:It may be "useless" to you but it is far from useless.

I use mine as an off site backup for my music. Since I sleep every day, I can fill it up while I do that, no problem.

What about those who sleep only every few days?
We're screwed.

Had a really bad experience with these on the last go-round. Drive started misbehaving within 3 days, and failed completely within 30. Support from Centon was non-existent, well past any level of patience. I think I chased them for about 6 weeks before finally just giving up, and buying a Lexar.

ksligh wrote:Yeah, I used punch cards in 1981-1983 in college. Awwww the memories.

Kind of surprised you aren't yelling at people to get off your lawn. (Yet oddly glad at the same time!)

rosen380 wrote:Open it up

The control boards from hard rives sell for about $10/lb on eBay [gold reclamation]...

The platters about a dime a piece [probably more for yours since they are presumably much bigger platters than in a 3.5" drive]

The magnets and the attached alloy brackets about $1 for the pair.

The case is probably aluminum, $0.40 per pound.

--
And I imagine that newer techniques has allowed the manufacturers to use less gold and platinum than what they did in the 80s, so your components might carry a decent premium...

Granted for one drive, it might not be worth the hassle of all that

I think it would be worth more as it is. Especially really old hardware. My old electronics instructor has a 5MB hard drive that weighs about 20 pounds and has a 1/4 hp motor on it. He also has a removable disk pack from an old HP mainframe.

64 GIG for 30

IM CUMMMMMMMING to get one LOL

I'll echo what's already been said. It's sturdy, it holds a lot, it's cheap, but it's very...... verrrryyyyy... sloooowwwwwwwwww.......

Can I use it with my night vision goggles?

I've washed standard USB data sticks and never had an issue.


Is this one that much special?

I got one of these from Woot before, and while it's not the fastest thing on the planet, neither is a bus, but I dare you to fit as many people into a Ferrari. =P

Actually, I am a bit jealous because mine didn't come with the little keyring bit, and I would find that to be a very handy addition.

All this nostalgia is getting to me...Fortran...punch cards...5.25 floppy disks. The Commodores rocked right up until Lionel Ritchie left the group (wait, I could be confused and need a nap...feeling old, very old).

Skunkmonkey wrote:I got one of these from Woot before, and while it's not the fastest thing on the planet, neither is a bus, but I dare you to fit as many people into a Ferrari. =P

Actually, I am a bit jealous because mine didn't come with the little keyring bit, and I would find that to be a very handy addition.

Yeah but would you rather have this bus:



or this bus:

The best thing to do with large USB flash drives, put ubuntu on them and use them to take over any computer! Muhahahaha

I went through this the last time it was posted. I got one 2 rounds ago and LOVE it. The price (50c/gb) is very good, and read and write speeds are excellent for the price. I see people whining about 3mb/sec speeds and can only say FIX YOUR COMPUTER, you have a serious problem. Here, I'll run the test again. Centon64 plugged into the right USB port of my Late 2008 macbook pro:

apple:~ nfisher $ date ; dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024000 count=1000 of=/Volumes/Service\ Data\ 1/zerofile ; date
Wed May 16 10:06:15 CDT 2012
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 86.215014 secs (11877282 bytes/sec)
Wed May 16 10:07:42 CDT 2012
apple:~ nfisher $ date ; dd of=/dev/null bs=1024000 count=1000 if=/Volumes/Service\ Data\ 1/zerofile ; date
Wed May 16 10:07:59 CDT 2012
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 45.933657 secs (22293021 bytes/sec)
Wed May 16 10:08:45 CDT 2012

11mb/sec write, 22mb/sec read. If you are getting 3mb/sec read, you have something SEVERELY wrong with your computer, or you got a defective, or I got a miracle. Write speed is typically 50% of read speed for flash drives, so this one is right in line as expected.

I'm going to pick up two more for spares. Mine has a bootable 16b partition on it with recovery/repair tools, as well as a 46gb data partition, with plenty of room for tools and goodies, with room to spare.

BTW, at that speed, accounting for space taken by formatting, I can fill an empty drive in 90 minutes, and clean it out in 45 minutes. These people talking about all night to read the drive apparently are on some very tasty crack or Duuuude must have gotten a dellll.

*edit* it sold out WHILE I was entering this comment. FML...

Wow, I check it first thing when I get to my desk in the morning and it is sold out. That sucks. Would be one thing if it was 6pm, but it is early!

onerver wrote:My first computer had a 250 Mega bite hard drive with 8 gigs of Ram. Cost around $4200.00

Wow, that is huge... I started with two 5 1/4" floppies, monochrome monitor, and a few hundred k of RAM. Later added a 20 Megabyte hard drive which took a year to fill up.

<- Was too slow and missed the deal..

This would have been great to put TV shows & movies on to play on our Iconia tablet for trips.

virtual1one wrote:I went through this the last time it was posted. I got one 2 rounds ago and LOVE it. The price (50c/gb) is very good, and read and write speeds are excellent for the price. I see people whining about 3mb/sec speeds and can only say FIX YOUR COMPUTER, you have a serious problem. Here, I'll run the test again. Centon64 plugged into the right USB port of my Late 2008 macbook pro:

apple:~ nfisher $ date ; dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024000 count=1000 of=/Volumes/Service\ Data\ 1/zerofile ; date
Wed May 16 10:06:15 CDT 2012
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 86.215014 secs (11877282 bytes/sec)
Wed May 16 10:07:42 CDT 2012
apple:~ nfisher $ date ; dd of=/dev/null bs=1024000 count=1000 if=/Volumes/Service\ Data\ 1/zerofile ; date
Wed May 16 10:07:59 CDT 2012
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 45.933657 secs (22293021 bytes/sec)
Wed May 16 10:08:45 CDT 2012

11mb/sec write, 22mb/sec read. If you are getting 3mb/sec read, you have something SEVERELY wrong with your computer, or you got a defective, or I got a miracle. Write speed is typically 50% of read speed for flash drives, so this one is right in line as expected.

I'm going to pick up two more for spares. Mine has a bootable 16b partition on it with recovery/repair tools, as well as a 46gb data partition, with plenty of room for tools and goodies, with room to spare.

BTW, at that speed, accounting for space taken by formatting, I can fill an empty drive in 90 minutes, and clean it out in 45 minutes. These people talking about all night to read the drive apparently are on some very tasty crack or Duuuude must have gotten a dellll.

*edit* it sold out WHILE I was entering this comment. FML...

I think there is a confusion issue here:


11 mb/sec= 1.34 MB/sec

22 mb/sec= 2.68 MB/sec

There is nothing wrong with anyone's computer.

Don't feel bad if you missed out, buy 2 of these- it's much better performance, you won't lose the cap either.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208552&Tpk=20-208-552

geisman1008 wrote:I've had a regular 32GB Centon drive for some time and on at least two occassions left in my pants pocket only to find it later in the bottom of the washer. A day or two in a sealed container with some dry rice and it worked fine. No loss of any data and that one does not even claim to be water proof.

I had the same experience with an HP 16GB flash drive, rice works wonders!

gak0090 wrote:I think there is a confusion issue here:


11 mb/sec= 1.34 MB/sec

22 mb/sec= 2.68 MB/sec

There is nothing wrong with anyone's computer.

Good job ... powened. He needs to go back to school.

gak0090 wrote:I think there is a confusion issue here:


11 mb/sec= 1.34 MB/sec

22 mb/sec= 2.68 MB/sec

There is nothing wrong with anyone's computer.

If you look at his numbers, they were 11877282 bytes/sec and 22293021 bytes/sec. Bytes, not bits. He just used mb when maybe he should have used MB.

gak0090 wrote:Don't feel bad if you missed out, buy 2 of these- it's much better performance, you won't lose the cap either.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208552&Tpk=20-208-552

I feel better now. Thank you.

The caveat is that he was transferring zeros to the device. Since he was going faster than the rated speed, we can only assume that there was some compression happening somewhere. Either that or he has magic USB ports that push 11MBps of data over a 3MBps link.

I would be interested to see the same test repeated with a file generated from /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero.

It's also possible his OS is buffering up the write and dd is returning early before the bits are actually on the drive. Might want to check if the stick is mounted async or sync. Async is dangerous on a USB drive because people are bad about just yanking them out whenever they feel like, regardless of the number of outstanding buffers still waiting to be written out to the drive.

MITCHELLWOOT wrote:JCL on punch cards RULE!

Plus you could take old ones, staple them together, spray paint them gold and make Christmas wreaths from them.

Will these work with my Kodak a californium neutron flux multiplier?

Look on ebay-- people sell scrapped HDDs in large and small quantities all of the time. What I do is I keep a couple boxes in my basement that I toss the components in [gold-pin ram, tin ram, CPUs, PCI/ISA/etc boards, hard drive controllers, hard drive platters, gold pins, aluminum...

At some point, I'll do a listing on eBay.

--
Sure, some older hardware is worth more than it's scrap value. I wouldn't scrap anything before checking out it's value first. I sell the third-height Seagate 50-pin SCSI 1GB hard drives, but scrap the 2GB Seagate half-height SCAs because the former will sell for $25+ and the latter probably won't break even after eBay/PayPal fees.