[HankB]

I see a lot of these listed on the Egg but have never heard of the brand before. Does anyone here have knowledge of these? I'm going to make a recommendation for my BIL and I lean away from brands I'm not familiar with. I'd much prefer to stick with something like Mushkin, Transcend, Kingston, etc. that I'm know.

New manufacturer? Rebranded drives from other manufacturers?

Am I being overly concerned about brand on what must now surely be a commodity product?

[Ivy]

http://www.tweaktown.com/pressreleas...112/index.html
I guess you mean that one. According to those data its simply mainstream stuff, nothing special. There is endless amount of USB stick vendors, to me most of them are the same or use comparable mainstream hardware, Sony too. The best USB stick manufacturers are probably Corsair, Kingston and Verbatim, as far as my testing results go (which are probably outdated yet).

Guess you wanna know if that is a genuine brand, well, nope, same for almost any brand. There is only the difference between noname brand and name brand, but nowadays they are all mostly the same. Most drives, probably any, use a few parts which they will release in like 1000 different names but its usualy made from only a few main supplier of those flash modules.

Ofc i would be interested to know more background but that stuff is hard to get. All i know is that this brand is located in Taiwan and i guess they want to provide students with for cheap, not high end users.

The fastest (USB 3.0) sticks should reach between 70 and 150 read/write performance and those team group stuff isnt even at half of that speed (but even for USB 2.0 drive its very slow, 10 MB/s write speed is crap). Anyway, USB 2.0 will always cap at 35 MB/s, and about the quality of the modules (quality does mean endurance and not speed) there is close to no data. Its well hidden but usualy a USB stick is having significant shorter endurance than a SSD and a SSD is still less reliable than a HDD. Because the flash modules used arnt comparable quality such as the NAND a SSD got. My view is, that most USB modules are trashed at around 1000 rewrites (no matter what the manufacturers are telling, they rarely say the truth and are never unbiased). However, no one usualy testing it because testing them means to walk to the top of a mountain and back, not much got that patience.

[HankB]

More like this but yeah, that's the general idea. I just never heard of them before and I'm not really familiar with that market.

thanks,
hank

[Ivy]

Those USB 3.0 drives from that brand are still rather low speed and entirely mainstream.

I know probably lesser than you because i consider USB sticks as only useful to transfer data from device A to B, and thats what theyr intention is, however, there is surely a difference in speed and lifetime. Although, my data will have such a high space requirement that i always have to use a usual USB HDD who got 500 to 1000 GB, any other is to small for me, so i usualy never touch USB flash sticks.

I do recommend to get a 1.8" Buffalo (Ministation) HDD who got between 500-1000 GB data storage, its usualy my best friend and small enough to move it anywhere i want it. They aswell are much more reliable in long term and can handle unlimited rewrite. That means, they are even useful as active backup drive. Finally, they beat USB sticks in any aspect except price and (physical) size, but theyr (physical) size is truly extremely small, it can be stored inside any kind of small bucket, no matter its size. And if there is huge data amount in a given location all of a sudden, they never give up... so much storage.