I've pretty much stopped using 'stick' type storage for anything >256MB, as regardless of brand and series, my experience is that these thingies overheat under anything but light write usage, and either slow to a crawl or drop off the USB bus entirely before my copy is finished.
'Credit card' sized SSDs are not that much more inconvenient to carry and store, and don't exhibit any of these issues for me.
And the thermals on these things must be horrible, plus the label makes it look like a knock-off: Sandirk?
NVMe enclosure are cheap, mine is a ugreen supporting usb 3.2 gen2 and i paid less than 20 euro. Put any kind of half decent nvme in it covered by one of those cheap heat dissipator.
And not for nothing, the SSDs that GP is describing are exactly this - NVME sticks with a USB/Thunderbolt interface and some kind of usually aluminum enclosure with a layer of thermal conductive material.
Dockcase makes enclosures with a capacitor that hold ~5 or 10 seconds of charge, and on power loss sends whatever the “get ready for shut down NOW” signal is to the contained drives. This obviously doesn’t help with unsynced data that the OS had not sent to the drive yet. I use one for a ventoy install, an another for a windows to go install. Windows on a usb stick is finicky to get recognized as bootable sometimes (likely a combination of hardware and software), but otherwise works well when it’s up.
One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with
These look cool but support only up to 4TB capacity? That feels like a super silly limitation. Do they plan to release anything with higher capacity support? Or maybe these would unofficially work fine with 8TB etc.?
I can’t say for sure, but I regard all statements on maximum supported capacity to mean “that’s the biggest drive we had to test so far”, rather than being an actual technical limitation
One thing I forgot warn about, while this applies to every drive with data you care about, have automated and tested backups. SSDs can and will just up and die, and most drives these days are going to be completely unrecoverable in practice unless the issue is solder ball corrosion/breakage.
Basically, be prepared for that 8TB of data to go poof, where it’s in an enclosure or not.
If your drive is suddenly missing, you might need to reboot, or remove the device to drain power and try again, or use a different USB port. Rarely, drives need to get power cycled to recover from power loss (I’ve not had to do with with my dockcase enclosure, but did a few times prior in earlier enclosures). See https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
Also stay away from cheap Samsung OEM drives on eBay, they have dogshit firmware that’s often been fucked with by whatever the vendor was, with no good way to get updates even if they exist. If your drive suddenly shows up as 1GB with the firmware version of “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”), it’s all gone.
You might be surprised. Just the other day I put an 8 TB drive in an old USB 2.0 SATA enclosure and it presented as a 1.1 TB drive, suggesting that the bridge chip is limited to 31-bit (?!?) LBAs.
It's key to get an enclosure with a chipset that will support whatever interface your computer actually provides, otherwise a lot of these enclosures will fall back to USB-3 speeds for compatibility and things will be slow. This site gives a pretty good overview of the chipsets out there and pros/cons of each one.
I've had good experiences with Acasis[1] enclosures - they seem have a lot of aluminum surface area for dissipating heat - but I get the feeling that a lot of these things are very similar in practice since they're just slapping the same chipsets into different boxes.
+1 for that Acasis. I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional >1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. I benchmarked it with DiskMark64 and speeds are as expected for 40Gbps-class xfer.
It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly.
It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.
At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.
I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.
These days most of them seem to work just fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I use several brands across all 3 and never had an issue. I like the DOCKCASE Visual Smart ($40) or Explorer Edition ($50). They have large capacitors to provide 10 seconds of power loss protection, support 10Gbps USB speeds, and have a second USB port just for power which makes it compatible with SSD's that draw a lot of power. I like the info on the little screens because I swap SSD's in/out frequently. There are cheaper ones that work fine too - the "SABRENT USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure" ($30) is nice for, well, not needing a screwdriver to swap out the drive - but it might not deliver enough power for some overkill SSD like the (now Sandisk) WD Black SN8100 - but the DockCase will, as long as you also plug in an auxiliary power USB cable.
A drive like the Patriot Memory P400 Lite is very low power, so it works with cheaper enclosures or USB ports that don't deliver as much power to the peripheral. It also generates less heat, which can help sustain performance depending on the enclosure and environment.
I have experience with ext4 not through deliberate choice but through circumstance.
ext4 can't be natively mounted in Mac and Windows but you can install third party software and still mount it from the command line easily. And of course ext4 works fine with Linux natively.
I don't know if you can install the Mac OS or Windows OS on an ext4 drive and directly boot from it, however.
ExFAT is becoming a good option on all three. Windows and MacOS have native support, and more and more Linux distros are getting support as well I believe.
When you say Linux, reliability depends on distro. I had tried to install Mint on an external harddrive, and the stupid installer modified the boot loader to search for Grub on the removable disk. No removable disk, no grub, no booting of any OS. Idiotic. Lets not get started on the repair/recovery process since another mainstream OS recovery tools wont mount Fat32 EFI partition in R/W, needed to verify the uuid for bootmanager.exe - long story short, had to reinstall everything. Note - neither Windows or Linux are on that box anymore, but Haiku and OSX works brilliantly.
I am begining to dislike mint, that I incidentaly downoaded via mobile data onto an old hinky android phone, then put on a usb drive with a usb/c adapter, with "etchDroid", and booted an ancient desk top with.
The phone I have now, has a sim tray with places for 2 SIM's and an SD card, so with one of these 1TB, USB-C drives and a 1 TB SD card, it should be possible to carry a local copy of OSM, and a copy of wikipedia(text only) with plenty of room left, the full wiki is a monsterous 410 TB
Every Wikipedia article including pictures is ~111GB. Unless you want all of the edit history then maybe you are right.
I have had Wikipedia on my phone for years, local search is fast enough. I also recommend Wiktionary, which has practically every word in every language and is less than 10GB.
ok!thanks
I took the numbers I found at face value.
Having local copys of OSM and wiki will be a
big asset for work, as mobile data is my only source, and it is not exactly reliable.
though I do have enough data on my business plan to indulge in an occasional download frenzy from the awsome site you linked.
I have to admit I still don't really know what thunderbolt even is. I think it's something that is done over USB-C, and requires hardware support on the CPU.
I'm guessing it's one search query + a one minute read away though. I just haven't.
Does Oculink have any special sauce to it? I was under the impression it presented itself as regular old PCI-e and it is really "just" a cabling solution.
The most irritating thing about the credit-card sized ones, are how they aren’t attached if you move around.
I like to be mobile, so I put some velcro ultra-mate on the back of my laptop, and also on my disk, then the disk can be attached and plugged in while I move around.
I also got a 90-degree USB-C cable for a more direct cable route.
I just upgraded the internal storage of my Lenovo T14 (AMD, Gen6) to 4TB, and that took all of 5 minutes. And that laptop was definitely made in 2025, although I agree that consumer sentiment overwhelmingly favors models that are less convenient in that respect.
Not really an issue outside the Apple ecosystem and a few fringe tablet hybrids like from Microsoft. Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
> Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
Though some make it quite difficult to get in to replace the drive, and put everything back together after.
Some are very easy: an obvious compartment at the bottom, unscrew lid, remove drive, put in replacement, power up and transfer old content, done. I've seen both NVMe and 2.5" SATA drives arranged this way. On the other hand, upgrading my friend's laptop recently involved taking most of it apart, the drive was under the keyboard inaccessible from the back, with other link cables (for keyboard, antenna, screen) in the way so they had to be disconnected and were in very inconvenient arrangements for reconnecting after…
This reminded me of my professor's laptop with a Ricochet wireless modem attached in much the same way back in the early/mid 1990s. That was an early wireless ISP prevalent in the SF Bay Area.
I've always wondered about why those little gadgets don't come with metal encasings bonded to the chip with a thermal pad, or putty out of the factory. Be it brushed aluminum, copper, or another alloy. Brushed, anodized, or with fins for 'heavy duty (outdoor/industrial?)' use(which you could clean with a brush, if need be).
There should be a market/demand for that, when people are paying fantasy prices for gamified crap, yes?
They do? But that just means that my Transcend USB stick, made from aluminium, just heats up to 60C which makes it very hard to remove after writing without burning your fingers :(
Interesting that you mention that brand :-) I had some of them long ago, and they didn't last long. The true metal enclosure was just that, with the 'board' just held in place by the USB-part, and some pins from the other end. No thermal pads, or putty.
The other one was just metallic painted plastic.
That was the era of 512MB to 4GB. Never bought again from them.
I have two SSK USB sticks that give me write speeds of up to 1GB/s (as long as they're not filled to the brim). I've copied things like 80GB games in something like 2-3 minutes. A real SSD will always be best, but I'm pretty happy with these USB sticks.
The USB sticks you talk about are basically USB SSDs, not what we know as traditional thumb drives.
I have a similar one too from HP(PNY), and it's crazy fast for its size, but the issue is its controller (ASMedia IIRC) reports it to the OS as a UAS (USB Attached SCSI), similar to an external HDD, instead of Removable Mass Storage as most thumb drives do, so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it, and that controller seems to be backlisted by the Linux kernel for some reason, so it's not recognized on linux unless I fiddle with the "options usb-storage quirks" kernel parameters, but even so my BIOS can't detect it to boot from it. From what I understand the issue causing all this is that it's a native 4K-block device causing issues with booting on it as typically 512-byte block native devices are required for EFI boot, or at least that have 512-byte emulation support which this controller does not.
I am so disappointed because I bought a fast USB SSD to install and dual boot Linux on it as a second drive for my Windows laptop. If only I knew that there's such a big difference in the types of USB drives out there and that they're not all remotely the same.
So do your due diligence on linux compatibility, if you ever want to buy these USB SSDs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it". If I use it in Windows or Linux, I can eject it like I can any standard non-SSD USB stick. I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically? I've seen some messed up BIOS's that simply defy all expectation in how they work. Then again, I primarily only use these things to transfer data between machines (primarily games), so all I really care about is their performance.
I also preferably call them USB sticks instead of SSDs, since afaik TRIM isn't supported on them, which makes them significantly worse than any proper SSD.
>I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it"
Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
> I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically?
NO, like I explained before, it's not the BIOS, it's the lack of 512 block support on the USB SSD controller which is very uncommon on traditional USB thumb drives but is needed for UEFI/BIOS boot. USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
>I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue.
Because yours have 512 native support like most USB drives. But No 512 support, no OS boot. Simple.
MSC and UAS are SCSI transport protocols and have nothing to do with a device being identified as a removable device, which happens at the higher command set layer.
Specifically, flash drives typically set the removable media bit in their response to the SCSI INQUIRY command, which makes the OS believe they contain a medium that can be removed and replaced, like a floppy, "superfloppy" (Zip, LS-120, SyQuest, etc.), or optical drive.
This is why Windows, in particular, exhibits curious behavior when dealing with flash drives:
It assigns a drive letter to a flash drive even if it contains no partitions — MS-DOS and Windows floppies, "superfloppies", and optical media were traditionally unpartitioned.
It allows you to eject the "medium" from the drive — at which point it typically becomes unusable, like a floppy drive with no disk inserted, unless you have a way to send a START STOP UNIT command with the load eject bit set (e.g., the sg3_utils[1] sg_start command), which directs a removable drive to attempt to load the inserted medium (a tray-loading CD-ROM drive with an open tray will retract the tray and spin up the disc, if present; a tape drive capable of injecting an ejected tape will do so; a flash drive with nothing to physically eject will once again present as a drive with medium present).
Most usefully, it causes Windows to default to more conservative caching behavior that makes surprise removal safer (this can be changed for specific devices via Properties in Device Manager), and therefore doesn't display a warning when the drive is physically disconnected without requesting disconnection from the OS and waiting for the "safe to remove" notification.
> Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
"need" according to what? If this is about writeback caching, you can turn that off manually for the disk. And isn't windows the only OS that disables it by default for removable disks?
> USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
> The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
>Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
Which EFIs and bootloaders support that though? Everything I tried failed.
Thanks I already switched to a SATA SSD with USB3.0 adapter that works for booting Linux, I'm just annoyed spending the money on a fast pricy USB drive that doesn't work for anything else than Windows file transfers because of some BS technicality.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro is the best I've found for USB sticks (not to be confused with the "Extreme Go" which looks very similar and sucks). Just be aware that there are a lot of knockoffs, so be careful of where you source and test the speed of a large file copy (along with checksumming the contents) right after purchasing. The real drives always have a metal enclosure as well, which helps.
Someone please copy the yubikey 5c form factor but make it a flash drive. I've been looking for years for a small, durable, usb type-c flashdrive for my keychain but nothing comes close to the yubikey 5c. The 5c has the metal ring so it won't ever rip off my keychain, the hole is large enough to fit a solid metal ring through it, and it is small enough that I can keep it on my keychain and use it without stressing my usb type c ports.
The best I have found so far with good specs is the "sandisk SanDisk ultra dual drive go". The spinny thing is super annoying but you can glue it in place if you don't need the type-A. It's a bit bigger than the yubikey, but it's smaller than the other alternatives.
That's the one that I use now! I'm weary of the spinny kind because with other brands/models the outer spinner has ripped off the flash drive, but at least so far I haven't had that issue with the "SanDisk ultra dual drive go". The only modification I've had to do to it so far is lubricating the spinny bit because it was all grindy and rough.
I got the ultra dual drive (non-go), no silly spinny bit, just a sliding mechanism that locks into place in either configuration as well as fully retracted on both sides.
Having a stick with exposed contacts and no USB shell (like the yubikey has) is not possible in USB3 format. It requires springs on the stick itself, no chance of the easy, pretty much unbreakable yubikey format. That only works for USB2. USB3-A (and -C) reversed the part that is springy, what was previously in the receptacle is now in the plug. Of course USB3-A is a mixed standard so the USB2 part is still as it was for backwards compatibility.
The reason is that the springs wear the most. This ensures longevity of USB ports in laptops where they are hard to replace. A USB cable or device is usually much easier to replace, and also a PC is normally used with many devices so the wear is shared between them now. But it does mean the contacts on the plug side are more fragile now.
And without USB3, filling something at current capacity levels is going to be tedious.
Of course for a yubikey that just transfers a few bytes this is not an issue but for a USB key it is.
Are you thinking of the USB A yubikeys? The 5c that I linked has a shell around the connector. It seems no different to me than any usb type c or thunderbolt cables that I own.
Yes the A yubikeys indeed. That's the original yubikey, the C version came much later. And it's still pretty rare at our work so I didn't imagine the poster referred to that. Also because the A version is much more solid. The connector is just a plate and there's nowhere for dust and dirt to accumulate, unlike the C version.
Kingston stopped making the one I really liked. A truly small microSD to USB adapter that could fit in a wallet. This was perfect for always having a USB drive around and not taking up space in your pocket.
(OT, but while I was able to find what you were talking about by googling the part name, I couldn't follow that walmart link because I'm apparently "not a human").
Tiny form factor USB drives have been around for ages¹ but only for USB-A ports, so I assume the news here is the USB-C connector (and the availability of capacity over 256Gb). This would be nice, I've been looking for something small that will go in a C port without an adaptor that stops it being so tiny any more, but the shape of these looks like it would irritate me, sitting “high” above the port and likely above the device it is plugged into.
The closest I've found are minimal size dual-port things like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B5S29JWY/ but they could be half the length (when inserted) without the A connector at all. I have no portable devices without at least as many C ports as A's, non-portable devices with only A ports I can stick a C-in-A adaptor or two semi-permanently into.
Considering 1TB sandisk ssds (which have notoriously had high failure rates) were around 100 for 1TB for a while is pretty impressive they got it into that form factor. I wouldn't trust them for anything important though.
Obviously the solution is to get two, one on each side of your laptop, and set them up as mirrors of each other. Then your laptop looks more balanced and you can survive a failure!
"Plug and stay" is a bad idea. A couple of laptops ago, when putting it into the laptop backpack, my hand slipped and the laptop dropped about eight inches into the pocket. It landed directly onto a mouse dongle still plugged into the USB slot. (I know, the dongle should have been "up", I was distracted!) The result was a broken slot, bummer.
Yep, my SanDisk SSD died, was one that had the bad firmware but supposedly a fixed revision. They did RMA it but took about a month. Only using that now for Ventoy, can't really trust it for anything else. Also annoying is they wanted a serial number that they silk-screened on in tiny letters matte black on black.
Quick edit: Wasn't a fake either, was bought direct.
I also wonder if the HDMI port in the stock photo is still easily accessible with this thing plugged in. I hate plug in devices that block other inputs/ports.
Frankly, this is more a visual gimmick rather than useful form factor. And probably that's why sandisk went with this design of pill/small candy - because how long you can do boring 4cm-7cm oblong thumb drives?
This thing is too small to be handled or placed with confidence you won't drop it or knock if off the table.
If you use Linux (dual boot for instance) you can disable it with this boot arg for the kernel in Grub (and LILO too, you Slackware users, or Refind/Syslinux). Just append:
usb.autosuspend=-1 usbcore.autosuspend=-1
to the
linux quiet=1 foo bar blah blah... line in your /etc/default/grub, /etc/lilo.conf or whatever bootloader you use. Then, run update-grub or similar.
> The Extreme Fit has been formally announced, and this dongle-like USB Type-C flash drive is available with up to 1 TB capacity. Sandisk also notes that it delivers USB 3.2 Gen 1 performance, and the starting launch price is $15.99.
What a weasel worded sentence. "1 TB … $16". Of course, it's $110, and yes, I see the qualifiers here. Allegedly journalistic sites should cut out the marketing sleeze before publishing. "Starting at 64 GB for $15 and ranging up to 1 TB for $110" it's not hard to write.
One would hope the durability of this is keeping pace with the capacity. If not, what is the niche? The 1TB is an enticement to use this for more than shuffling files from place to place. But absent the durability I would not want to do that.
Personally, I’ve long wanted a USB flash drive large enough to store my full movie collection. Traditional external hard drives are too cumbersome to use on e.g. public transit. By contrast, it’s possible to plug in a flash drive and still actually use my laptop on my lap.
If the drive died, I wouldn’t care too much (beyond the cost of replacing the drive), because the master copy of my collection would still be at home. (And of course I have other backups besides.)
The thing is, 1 TB is actually too small to make this work. I’d really need 4 TB.
Yeah, that's one thing we lost with USB-C. The USB-A port was big enough for a whole system (storage device, wireless chip, security processor) to fit inside. With type C we're back to dongles hanging out.
I want one that is shaped like the USB-C port. Like it was extruded from the port. About as long as a key, maybe a shorter key, like a mailbox key. Has a rounded end with a hole to make a very sturdy keyring hole. Capacity is limited to what would be reliable and not overheat. <1g.
It sounds like you're describing the yubikey 5c form factor. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a flash drive matching that form factor in my years of searching.
Back when Macbook airs had tiny drives and sdcard slots, there were multiple vendors selling flush-mount sd cards. They work surprisingly well, they can sink heat well into the aluminum body.
This product isn't quite there yet, but it's clearly aiming for the same market.
It's a portable device, everything on it needs be backed up frequently in case of loss or theft anyway.
I just wanted more storage for media for when I'm not connected to my home setup and/or into a fast internet pipe, and also didn't want to pay apple 1000% margin for 2 commodity flash chips.
Since some time ago when "storage is cheap" was trendy, I have been thinking about the question of physical boundaries of data storage, i.e. how many Terabytes can be fit in a square (cubic?) centimetre? Do we know?
It's hard to get people to pay much more than $200 for a dense drive that will overheat with significant writes. So you can get this up to 1TB, and thumb drives at 2TB or maybe 4TB, but anything with more capacity stops being built keychain friendly even if technically the flash chips could be squeezed closer.
They could get rid of the overheating problems by slapping some Frore systems cooling chips on the dies and IO chips. No need to cook the mf out of the chips as we already have solutions to cool them.
When will they start offering flash drives which have a "rubbery" connection to itself (imagine a tenth of an inch of flex cable in silicon) so the port won't take a beating.
SSK and Transcend sell USB-C SSD thumb drives with speeds of 1000 MB/s. They're SSDs though, not flash memory, but they are thumb drives, not big boxes.
At around 120C or so lead solder can become weaker, and this temperature is forbidden in devices that experience vibration or other perturbations. Unleaded solders can handle higher temperatures. All consumer products today are RoHS 6 and so do not have lead.
It would not surprise me if a heavily written ss device in an unventilated environment, such a laptop on a bed with a blanket covering it, or left operating in a bag, could get close to such a temperature on the PCBA. It would also dissipate heat to the USB connector of the laptop, possibly weakening it as well.
Looks like there are some data and guidelines are in ISO 13732-1:2006. $250ish per download, as well as probably available in the company intranet/local city library for free access.
When I was studying at university, I had the highest-capacity USB drive of its time, which was 64mb. I was able to fit all my Word documents and some extras, and still felt huge. I can't find a reason for anyone to use a tiny flash drive and store 1tb info on it. It is too risky to store anything important without a backup. Versioning is also an issue and must be synced somewhere all the time. I thought we were over flash drives already. I only use flash drives for installing fresh distros on old computers. Can't find a reason to use them anymore.
I used SanDisk Cruzer Fit https://amzn.to/47OqNXT for a very long time (USB 2.0) for ESXi server installations too. Never had a problem. But this "new" design looks terrible.
Backup drive is my use-case. But that means a mountain of sustained write traffic, which means thermals are important, which is where this thing sucks. I had been using a regular external with a short cable, until I got a Framework and decided to try one of their "fits in the module slot" SSDs, which is perfect.
I still pop it out after the backup and store it elsewhere, but it's lovely that during the backup job (which can take a while if it's doing a fresh copy), it's completely unobtrusive and can't break off if I set the lappy down wrong.
Maybe they have a GoPro and want to be able to do some basic 4K video manipulation. Or want to download some warez or porn, or use it as a backup drive, etc.
1TB is enough space to be actually useful for some of this, and if you have a somewhat older laptop, it might only have 256GB or 512GB internal.
I've pretty much stopped using 'stick' type storage for anything >256MB, as regardless of brand and series, my experience is that these thingies overheat under anything but light write usage, and either slow to a crawl or drop off the USB bus entirely before my copy is finished.
'Credit card' sized SSDs are not that much more inconvenient to carry and store, and don't exhibit any of these issues for me.
And the thermals on these things must be horrible, plus the label makes it look like a knock-off: Sandirk?
NVMe enclosure are cheap, mine is a ugreen supporting usb 3.2 gen2 and i paid less than 20 euro. Put any kind of half decent nvme in it covered by one of those cheap heat dissipator.
And not for nothing, the SSDs that GP is describing are exactly this - NVME sticks with a USB/Thunderbolt interface and some kind of usually aluminum enclosure with a layer of thermal conductive material.
How do you deal with chronic removal of drive before unmounting?
Are there any enclosures that hold charge to prevent data corruption in an event of sudden removal?
Dockcase makes enclosures with a capacitor that hold ~5 or 10 seconds of charge, and on power loss sends whatever the “get ready for shut down NOW” signal is to the contained drives. This obviously doesn’t help with unsynced data that the OS had not sent to the drive yet. I use one for a ventoy install, an another for a windows to go install. Windows on a usb stick is finicky to get recognized as bootable sometimes (likely a combination of hardware and software), but otherwise works well when it’s up.
https://www.dockcase.com/collections/ssd-enclosure
One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with
These look cool but support only up to 4TB capacity? That feels like a super silly limitation. Do they plan to release anything with higher capacity support? Or maybe these would unofficially work fine with 8TB etc.?
I can’t say for sure, but I regard all statements on maximum supported capacity to mean “that’s the biggest drive we had to test so far”, rather than being an actual technical limitation
One thing I forgot warn about, while this applies to every drive with data you care about, have automated and tested backups. SSDs can and will just up and die, and most drives these days are going to be completely unrecoverable in practice unless the issue is solder ball corrosion/breakage.
Basically, be prepared for that 8TB of data to go poof, where it’s in an enclosure or not.
If your drive is suddenly missing, you might need to reboot, or remove the device to drain power and try again, or use a different USB port. Rarely, drives need to get power cycled to recover from power loss (I’ve not had to do with with my dockcase enclosure, but did a few times prior in earlier enclosures). See https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
Also stay away from cheap Samsung OEM drives on eBay, they have dogshit firmware that’s often been fucked with by whatever the vendor was, with no good way to get updates even if they exist. If your drive suddenly shows up as 1GB with the firmware version of “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”), it’s all gone.
You might be surprised. Just the other day I put an 8 TB drive in an old USB 2.0 SATA enclosure and it presented as a 1.1 TB drive, suggesting that the bridge chip is limited to 31-bit (?!?) LBAs.
Any recommendations for >20gbit/s enclosures with passive cooling (that are also not huge)?
I have a 10gbit/s enclosure and a 4TB gen4 nvme in it. It pains me to know that it could achieve >3GB/s write speeds but hindered by the interface.
Highly recommend this site: https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...
It's key to get an enclosure with a chipset that will support whatever interface your computer actually provides, otherwise a lot of these enclosures will fall back to USB-3 speeds for compatibility and things will be slow. This site gives a pretty good overview of the chipsets out there and pros/cons of each one.
I've had good experiences with Acasis[1] enclosures - they seem have a lot of aluminum surface area for dissipating heat - but I get the feeling that a lot of these things are very similar in practice since they're just slapping the same chipsets into different boxes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-Aluminum-External-Support-C...
+1 for that Acasis. I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional >1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. I benchmarked it with DiskMark64 and speeds are as expected for 40Gbps-class xfer.
It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
This one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008555989592.html
Not small, but not huge either. More importantly, it gets about 3/4GB/s with a Kingston NV3 4TB drive and very acceptable temps.
sort of related, but I really like the Sabrent PCIe 5.0 nvme enclosures.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQZ6SYD1
No tools to insert m.2 nvme stick, easily fits and locks into a pcie slot, without a metal bracket to unscrew/remove.
I don't have a pcie gen 5 system, but the new samsung drives might do 14,800 MB/s
I also love thin ethernet patch cables. and 5-in-1 usb cables for travel.
I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly.
It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.
At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.
I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.
And they are fast
Even smaller and faster are nvme enclosures over thunderbolt. Easily can be boot drive.
Any recommended enclosures that work reliably with Linux?
These days most of them seem to work just fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I use several brands across all 3 and never had an issue. I like the DOCKCASE Visual Smart ($40) or Explorer Edition ($50). They have large capacitors to provide 10 seconds of power loss protection, support 10Gbps USB speeds, and have a second USB port just for power which makes it compatible with SSD's that draw a lot of power. I like the info on the little screens because I swap SSD's in/out frequently. There are cheaper ones that work fine too - the "SABRENT USB 3.2 Type-C Tool-Free Enclosure" ($30) is nice for, well, not needing a screwdriver to swap out the drive - but it might not deliver enough power for some overkill SSD like the (now Sandisk) WD Black SN8100 - but the DockCase will, as long as you also plug in an auxiliary power USB cable.
A drive like the Patriot Memory P400 Lite is very low power, so it works with cheaper enclosures or USB ports that don't deliver as much power to the peripheral. It also generates less heat, which can help sustain performance depending on the enclosure and environment.
Which filesystem do you use that handles large disks and can be mounted by Linux, Windows, and Mac?
The exFAT suggested below is really not resilient enough that I could trust GBs of data on it. Easily gets corrupted.
If you don't need to use it on Mac/Windows, use a FS like BTRFS with checksumming feature.
Don't use any FS that doesn't have checksum feature as silent bitrot is real.
So, nothing? Unbelievable
Ext4 and NTFS. FUSE for linux and Paragon Software for MacOS. Though often I have three partitions, so I use APFS, NTFS, and Ext4 on the same drive.
A related challenge is encryption of removable flash storage.
Linux has FUSE read-only support for decrypting APFS. iOS can read/write encrypted APFS that is formatted on macOS.
Would be nice to have encrypted ZFS support on multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.
I have experience with ext4 not through deliberate choice but through circumstance.
ext4 can't be natively mounted in Mac and Windows but you can install third party software and still mount it from the command line easily. And of course ext4 works fine with Linux natively.
I don't know if you can install the Mac OS or Windows OS on an ext4 drive and directly boot from it, however.
ExFAT is becoming a good option on all three. Windows and MacOS have native support, and more and more Linux distros are getting support as well I believe.
NTFS
When you say Linux, reliability depends on distro. I had tried to install Mint on an external harddrive, and the stupid installer modified the boot loader to search for Grub on the removable disk. No removable disk, no grub, no booting of any OS. Idiotic. Lets not get started on the repair/recovery process since another mainstream OS recovery tools wont mount Fat32 EFI partition in R/W, needed to verify the uuid for bootmanager.exe - long story short, had to reinstall everything. Note - neither Windows or Linux are on that box anymore, but Haiku and OSX works brilliantly.
I am begining to dislike mint, that I incidentaly downoaded via mobile data onto an old hinky android phone, then put on a usb drive with a usb/c adapter, with "etchDroid", and booted an ancient desk top with. The phone I have now, has a sim tray with places for 2 SIM's and an SD card, so with one of these 1TB, USB-C drives and a 1 TB SD card, it should be possible to carry a local copy of OSM, and a copy of wikipedia(text only) with plenty of room left, the full wiki is a monsterous 410 TB
Every Wikipedia article including pictures is ~111GB. Unless you want all of the edit history then maybe you are right.
I have had Wikipedia on my phone for years, local search is fast enough. I also recommend Wiktionary, which has practically every word in every language and is less than 10GB.
https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng
ok!thanks I took the numbers I found at face value. Having local copys of OSM and wiki will be a big asset for work, as mobile data is my only source, and it is not exactly reliable. though I do have enough data on my business plan to indulge in an occasional download frenzy from the awsome site you linked.
https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng
No need for thunderbolt, had good experience with good old high speed usb.
I have to admit I still don't really know what thunderbolt even is. I think it's something that is done over USB-C, and requires hardware support on the CPU.
I'm guessing it's one search query + a one minute read away though. I just haven't.
It’s a PCIe tunnelling protocol, sort of. The other simpler one is Oculink.
Most of the time you could do the same thing with USB <4 without slowdown.
Does Oculink have any special sauce to it? I was under the impression it presented itself as regular old PCI-e and it is really "just" a cabling solution.
I’m not entirely sure. It definitely don’t have its own protocol like Thunderbolt and can’t possibly be secured.
Good to know! Thanks.
Mobile storage has gotten so much better in the last few years.
The most irritating thing about the credit-card sized ones, are how they aren’t attached if you move around.
I like to be mobile, so I put some velcro ultra-mate on the back of my laptop, and also on my disk, then the disk can be attached and plugged in while I move around.
I also got a 90-degree USB-C cable for a more direct cable route.
Is this what we get when we stop making laptops with upgradeable internal storage?
I just upgraded the internal storage of my Lenovo T14 (AMD, Gen6) to 4TB, and that took all of 5 minutes. And that laptop was definitely made in 2025, although I agree that consumer sentiment overwhelmingly favors models that are less convenient in that respect.
Same, with an x1 gen5, upgraded NVME to 1TB
This boy is 8 year old today (bought in 2017 November) and still delivers me the €€€ at $consultingjob
Meanwhile, modern Apple users: https://youtu.be/RDBX6FTYLoQ
For me it was pure ASMR content
I still utilize large external drives on my laptop with upgradeable storage, so we get it either way.
Not really an issue outside the Apple ecosystem and a few fringe tablet hybrids like from Microsoft. Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
> Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.
Though some make it quite difficult to get in to replace the drive, and put everything back together after.
Some are very easy: an obvious compartment at the bottom, unscrew lid, remove drive, put in replacement, power up and transfer old content, done. I've seen both NVMe and 2.5" SATA drives arranged this way. On the other hand, upgrading my friend's laptop recently involved taking most of it apart, the drive was under the keyboard inaccessible from the back, with other link cables (for keyboard, antenna, screen) in the way so they had to be disconnected and were in very inconvenient arrangements for reconnecting after…
>the drive was under the keyboard inaccessible from the back
Must be an old design from around ~10 or so years ago. Acer I presume.
What do you do with all that storage?
Here's the root partition (well, lvm) on a laptop I have been using for over three years now
I do have an external drive for backups and another for drone footage but this is it. Everything else is either fast enough in the cloud or just here.I record video in raw, so it’s mainly dealing with video files during editing.
I want to see if I can move to prores in my import step, but I haven’t found a good workflow that allows for that.
Rust compilation artifacts.
This reminded me of my professor's laptop with a Ricochet wireless modem attached in much the same way back in the early/mid 1990s. That was an early wireless ISP prevalent in the SF Bay Area.
I've always wondered about why those little gadgets don't come with metal encasings bonded to the chip with a thermal pad, or putty out of the factory. Be it brushed aluminum, copper, or another alloy. Brushed, anodized, or with fins for 'heavy duty (outdoor/industrial?)' use(which you could clean with a brush, if need be).
There should be a market/demand for that, when people are paying fantasy prices for gamified crap, yes?
They do? But that just means that my Transcend USB stick, made from aluminium, just heats up to 60C which makes it very hard to remove after writing without burning your fingers :(
Interesting that you mention that brand :-) I had some of them long ago, and they didn't last long. The true metal enclosure was just that, with the 'board' just held in place by the USB-part, and some pins from the other end. No thermal pads, or putty.
The other one was just metallic painted plastic.
That was the era of 512MB to 4GB. Never bought again from them.
It's a stylized S but it seems to be the official 'SanDisk' - the same image is on https://shop.sandisk.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-e..., linked in the article
I have two SSK USB sticks that give me write speeds of up to 1GB/s (as long as they're not filled to the brim). I've copied things like 80GB games in something like 2-3 minutes. A real SSD will always be best, but I'm pretty happy with these USB sticks.
The USB sticks you talk about are basically USB SSDs, not what we know as traditional thumb drives.
I have a similar one too from HP(PNY), and it's crazy fast for its size, but the issue is its controller (ASMedia IIRC) reports it to the OS as a UAS (USB Attached SCSI), similar to an external HDD, instead of Removable Mass Storage as most thumb drives do, so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it, and that controller seems to be backlisted by the Linux kernel for some reason, so it's not recognized on linux unless I fiddle with the "options usb-storage quirks" kernel parameters, but even so my BIOS can't detect it to boot from it. From what I understand the issue causing all this is that it's a native 4K-block device causing issues with booting on it as typically 512-byte block native devices are required for EFI boot, or at least that have 512-byte emulation support which this controller does not.
I am so disappointed because I bought a fast USB SSD to install and dual boot Linux on it as a second drive for my Windows laptop. If only I knew that there's such a big difference in the types of USB drives out there and that they're not all remotely the same.
So do your due diligence on linux compatibility, if you ever want to buy these USB SSDs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it". If I use it in Windows or Linux, I can eject it like I can any standard non-SSD USB stick. I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically? I've seen some messed up BIOS's that simply defy all expectation in how they work. Then again, I primarily only use these things to transfer data between machines (primarily games), so all I really care about is their performance.
I also preferably call them USB sticks instead of SSDs, since afaik TRIM isn't supported on them, which makes them significantly worse than any proper SSD.
>I'm not sure what you mean by "so you can't hot -plug/-unplug it"
Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
> I'm also not sure what issues you've been having with booting from them. Might be a compatibility issue with your BIOS specifically?
NO, like I explained before, it's not the BIOS, it's the lack of 512 block support on the USB SSD controller which is very uncommon on traditional USB thumb drives but is needed for UEFI/BIOS boot. USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
>I've occasionally used these things to boot Linux LiveCDs without issue.
Because yours have 512 native support like most USB drives. But No 512 support, no OS boot. Simple.
MSC and UAS are SCSI transport protocols and have nothing to do with a device being identified as a removable device, which happens at the higher command set layer.
Specifically, flash drives typically set the removable media bit in their response to the SCSI INQUIRY command, which makes the OS believe they contain a medium that can be removed and replaced, like a floppy, "superfloppy" (Zip, LS-120, SyQuest, etc.), or optical drive.
This is why Windows, in particular, exhibits curious behavior when dealing with flash drives:
It assigns a drive letter to a flash drive even if it contains no partitions — MS-DOS and Windows floppies, "superfloppies", and optical media were traditionally unpartitioned.
It allows you to eject the "medium" from the drive — at which point it typically becomes unusable, like a floppy drive with no disk inserted, unless you have a way to send a START STOP UNIT command with the load eject bit set (e.g., the sg3_utils[1] sg_start command), which directs a removable drive to attempt to load the inserted medium (a tray-loading CD-ROM drive with an open tray will retract the tray and spin up the disc, if present; a tape drive capable of injecting an ejected tape will do so; a flash drive with nothing to physically eject will once again present as a drive with medium present).
Most usefully, it causes Windows to default to more conservative caching behavior that makes surprise removal safer (this can be changed for specific devices via Properties in Device Manager), and therefore doesn't display a warning when the drive is physically disconnected without requesting disconnection from the OS and waiting for the "safe to remove" notification.
[1] https://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html
> Only UMS (universal mass storage) devices can be hot-plugged-unplugged without ejecting, while UAS (USB Attached SCSI) devices cannot and need to be ejected beforehand since the OS treats them like an internal drive instead of a removable one.
"need" according to what? If this is about writeback caching, you can turn that off manually for the disk. And isn't windows the only OS that disables it by default for removable disks?
> USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.
> The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.
Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
>Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.
Which EFIs and bootloaders support that though? Everything I tried failed.
This USB SSD boots Debian Linux 6.1 kernel on HP Ryzen laptop, https://www.pny.com/PNY-DUO-Link-V3-USB-3-2-Gen-2-Type-C-OTG...
Thanks I already switched to a SATA SSD with USB3.0 adapter that works for booting Linux, I'm just annoyed spending the money on a fast pricy USB drive that doesn't work for anything else than Windows file transfers because of some BS technicality.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro is the best I've found for USB sticks (not to be confused with the "Extreme Go" which looks very similar and sucks). Just be aware that there are a lot of knockoffs, so be careful of where you source and test the speed of a large file copy (along with checksumming the contents) right after purchasing. The real drives always have a metal enclosure as well, which helps.
Someone please copy the yubikey 5c form factor but make it a flash drive. I've been looking for years for a small, durable, usb type-c flashdrive for my keychain but nothing comes close to the yubikey 5c. The 5c has the metal ring so it won't ever rip off my keychain, the hole is large enough to fit a solid metal ring through it, and it is small enough that I can keep it on my keychain and use it without stressing my usb type c ports.
https://resources.yubico.com/53ZDUYE6/at/cm85k8947jm9g32znfs...
The best I have found so far with good specs is the "sandisk SanDisk ultra dual drive go". The spinny thing is super annoying but you can glue it in place if you don't need the type-A. It's a bit bigger than the yubikey, but it's smaller than the other alternatives.
That's the one that I use now! I'm weary of the spinny kind because with other brands/models the outer spinner has ripped off the flash drive, but at least so far I haven't had that issue with the "SanDisk ultra dual drive go". The only modification I've had to do to it so far is lubricating the spinny bit because it was all grindy and rough.
I got the ultra dual drive (non-go), no silly spinny bit, just a sliding mechanism that locks into place in either configuration as well as fully retracted on both sides.
when I realised I never use the type-A, I glued it in place with epoxy. Now I don't have to worry about it breaking.
Having a stick with exposed contacts and no USB shell (like the yubikey has) is not possible in USB3 format. It requires springs on the stick itself, no chance of the easy, pretty much unbreakable yubikey format. That only works for USB2. USB3-A (and -C) reversed the part that is springy, what was previously in the receptacle is now in the plug. Of course USB3-A is a mixed standard so the USB2 part is still as it was for backwards compatibility.
The reason is that the springs wear the most. This ensures longevity of USB ports in laptops where they are hard to replace. A USB cable or device is usually much easier to replace, and also a PC is normally used with many devices so the wear is shared between them now. But it does mean the contacts on the plug side are more fragile now.
And without USB3, filling something at current capacity levels is going to be tedious.
Of course for a yubikey that just transfers a few bytes this is not an issue but for a USB key it is.
Are you thinking of the USB A yubikeys? The 5c that I linked has a shell around the connector. It seems no different to me than any usb type c or thunderbolt cables that I own.
Yes the A yubikeys indeed. That's the original yubikey, the C version came much later. And it's still pretty rare at our work so I didn't imagine the poster referred to that. Also because the A version is much more solid. The connector is just a plate and there's nowhere for dust and dirt to accumulate, unlike the C version.
Kingston makes this product line for many years which meets the requirements I think
https://www.kingston.com/en/usb-flash-drives/datatraveler-dt...
Kingston stopped making the one I really liked. A truly small microSD to USB adapter that could fit in a wallet. This was perfect for always having a USB drive around and not taking up space in your pocket.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/658398-REG/Kingston_F...
Wow that is compact. Wouldn't it be painfully slow since it is microSD ?
That's close, but is USB-A, so much larger than the Yubikey GP is asking about.
I think this is as close as you can get
https://www.walmart.com/ip/PNY-128GB-DUO-LINK-USB-3-2-Type-C...
(OT, but while I was able to find what you were talking about by googling the part name, I couldn't follow that walmart link because I'm apparently "not a human").
Tiny form factor USB drives have been around for ages¹ but only for USB-A ports, so I assume the news here is the USB-C connector (and the availability of capacity over 256Gb). This would be nice, I've been looking for something small that will go in a C port without an adaptor that stops it being so tiny any more, but the shape of these looks like it would irritate me, sitting “high” above the port and likely above the device it is plugged into.
The closest I've found are minimal size dual-port things like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B5S29JWY/ but they could be half the length (when inserted) without the A connector at all. I have no portable devices without at least as many C ports as A's, non-portable devices with only A ports I can stick a C-in-A adaptor or two semi-permanently into.
--------
[1] Examples: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07HPX38XC/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07YYMX5LQ/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08772NT1L/
"up to 1 TB capacity... starting launch price is $15.99"
I have adblock, how did this SanDisk commercial make it through?
Note that the $15.99 is for the 64 GB version. The 1 TB version sells for above $100.
It follows the classic format of "Most expensive configuration [price ommited], Lowest price bracket [configuration ommited]"
Considering 1TB sandisk ssds (which have notoriously had high failure rates) were around 100 for 1TB for a while is pretty impressive they got it into that form factor. I wouldn't trust them for anything important though.
Goes well with their affiliate links. And it's actually discounted to $14.99 at sandisk https://shop.sandisk.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-e...
Plug and stay
Hopefully, this has been tested for durability and some MTBF specs are available to prove it.
Otherwise, buyer beware.
EDIT: I couldn't find any MBTF specs so I looked up the "limited warranty" for this product.
There is no warranty of uninterrupted or error-free operation.
Obviously the solution is to get two, one on each side of your laptop, and set them up as mirrors of each other. Then your laptop looks more balanced and you can survive a failure!
"Plug and stay" is a bad idea. A couple of laptops ago, when putting it into the laptop backpack, my hand slipped and the laptop dropped about eight inches into the pocket. It landed directly onto a mouse dongle still plugged into the USB slot. (I know, the dongle should have been "up", I was distracted!) The result was a broken slot, bummer.
"Plug and stay" is also a horrible idea at a time when laptops routinely come with only 2 USB ports.
I was foolish enough to buy SanDisk.
SanDisk flashdrives get extremely hot and die in months.
The warranty process is time consuming and tedious.
I stick to Samsung flashdrives now.
Can't say i have the same experiences. The only products to fail me where really really cheap AliExpress devices.
Sandisk in general I’ve had good luck with - but there are a ton of fakes out there.
That said, I see no way this drive could dissipate any useful amount of heat at all, so suspicious it would be a problem under sustained write loads.
Especially since most use cases likely would never have sustained write loads.
The way to tell if it's genuine Sandisk is if you can't get the damn thing out of the package without cussing!
I agree - I eventually (not just for this case) got some EMT shears, and oh boy. So much less blood hah.
Yep, my SanDisk SSD died, was one that had the bad firmware but supposedly a fixed revision. They did RMA it but took about a month. Only using that now for Ventoy, can't really trust it for anything else. Also annoying is they wanted a serial number that they silk-screened on in tiny letters matte black on black.
Quick edit: Wasn't a fake either, was bought direct.
I prefer the SK Hynix Beetle (X31) and Tube (T31) to Samsung flash drives, because internally the are DRAM SSDs, I hope they come out with new models.
SanDisks are very frequently fake, even in brick and mortar stores. Could it be you had a fake one?
I’d rather not have something like that poking out. Looks like it’ll ruin the port when for example it hooks behind something
I also wonder if the HDMI port in the stock photo is still easily accessible with this thing plugged in. I hate plug in devices that block other inputs/ports.
Frankly, this is more a visual gimmick rather than useful form factor. And probably that's why sandisk went with this design of pill/small candy - because how long you can do boring 4cm-7cm oblong thumb drives?
This thing is too small to be handled or placed with confidence you won't drop it or knock if off the table.
That's a more general problem with USB.
The problem I have with USB on windows is how windows insists on turning off/crashing drivers for anything attached to USB for long periods of time.
It’s gotten to the point I just turn off my machine (instead of power saving) so that things actually work when I turn it on.
If you use Linux (dual boot for instance) you can disable it with this boot arg for the kernel in Grub (and LILO too, you Slackware users, or Refind/Syslinux). Just append:
to the It will draw more power on laptops but not much.Just buy microsd to sd adapter that sits completely flush in the case. Like this called BaseQi:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0822/8493/files/feature-1_...
Also "just buy" a MacBook Pro to go with it?
Each hole depth is different though I’ve seen versions for some windows laptops like yoga
Speed and write durability are both going to be trash, alas.
Its for storage not like dev drive
> The Extreme Fit has been formally announced, and this dongle-like USB Type-C flash drive is available with up to 1 TB capacity. Sandisk also notes that it delivers USB 3.2 Gen 1 performance, and the starting launch price is $15.99.
What a weasel worded sentence. "1 TB … $16". Of course, it's $110, and yes, I see the qualifiers here. Allegedly journalistic sites should cut out the marketing sleeze before publishing. "Starting at 64 GB for $15 and ranging up to 1 TB for $110" it's not hard to write.
Amazon is a little higher priced, but you can get free shipping.
One would hope the durability of this is keeping pace with the capacity. If not, what is the niche? The 1TB is an enticement to use this for more than shuffling files from place to place. But absent the durability I would not want to do that.
Personally, I’ve long wanted a USB flash drive large enough to store my full movie collection. Traditional external hard drives are too cumbersome to use on e.g. public transit. By contrast, it’s possible to plug in a flash drive and still actually use my laptop on my lap.
If the drive died, I wouldn’t care too much (beyond the cost of replacing the drive), because the master copy of my collection would still be at home. (And of course I have other backups besides.)
The thing is, 1 TB is actually too small to make this work. I’d really need 4 TB.
> Claims to be extreme fit
> Shaped unlike any other USB memory stick and has awkward ill-fitting shape
Genuis
I had a USB-A from sandisk which was very solid and I used it for years. It wasn't flush with the body of the laptop, but was rounded and strong.
This looks super flimsy and like it might break off easily and ruin your port.
Yeah, that's one thing we lost with USB-C. The USB-A port was big enough for a whole system (storage device, wireless chip, security processor) to fit inside. With type C we're back to dongles hanging out.
> Error: Failed to load script: Fallback Failed
That’s unfortunate, apparently the site requires some js, that is probably blocked by my firewall, to even load the page.
https://shop.sandisk.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-e...
I want one that is shaped like the USB-C port. Like it was extruded from the port. About as long as a key, maybe a shorter key, like a mailbox key. Has a rounded end with a hole to make a very sturdy keyring hole. Capacity is limited to what would be reliable and not overheat. <1g.
It sounds like you're describing the yubikey 5c form factor. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a flash drive matching that form factor in my years of searching.
https://resources.yubico.com/53ZDUYE6/at/cm85k8947jm9g32znfs...
Close! I'm thinking something like the Kingston DataTraveler, but usb-c.
https://www.kingston.com/en/usb-flash-drives/datatraveler-dt...
Yeah, if that existed for usb type C then I'd buy 4 today. Such a perfect form factor, just stuck on the legacy connector.
Back when Macbook airs had tiny drives and sdcard slots, there were multiple vendors selling flush-mount sd cards. They work surprisingly well, they can sink heat well into the aluminum body.
This product isn't quite there yet, but it's clearly aiming for the same market.
There are still for any macbook pro with sd card slot. BaseQi or similar
Nothing beats cheap storage like that and completely flush with the case
But how reliable is it? I've heard stories about how unreliable it is, and it's got me concerned.
It's a portable device, everything on it needs be backed up frequently in case of loss or theft anyway.
I just wanted more storage for media for when I'm not connected to my home setup and/or into a fast internet pipe, and also didn't want to pay apple 1000% margin for 2 commodity flash chips.
Use it for some throughaway big files stuff or backup with something like backblaze
running a parallels windows install off one, no issues. macos does unmount if battery gets really low but not really an issue after reboot or replug.
I have a few of those still lying around, they were great!
Since some time ago when "storage is cheap" was trendy, I have been thinking about the question of physical boundaries of data storage, i.e. how many Terabytes can be fit in a square (cubic?) centimetre? Do we know?
That number is directly proportional to the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
Very interesting, thanks a lot. If only we had the densities :/
It's hard to get people to pay much more than $200 for a dense drive that will overheat with significant writes. So you can get this up to 1TB, and thumb drives at 2TB or maybe 4TB, but anything with more capacity stops being built keychain friendly even if technically the flash chips could be squeezed closer.
They could get rid of the overheating problems by slapping some Frore systems cooling chips on the dies and IO chips. No need to cook the mf out of the chips as we already have solutions to cool them.
When will they start offering flash drives which have a "rubbery" connection to itself (imagine a tenth of an inch of flex cable in silicon) so the port won't take a beating.
Doesn't stick out as much, no, but almost useless when a usb port is positioned above another usb port.
I've used a similar drive on my Chromebooks for the last decade.
I went looking for a USB-C version and was surprised not to find one.
I would love to see one with SSD speeds if such a thing is possible.
SSK and Transcend sell USB-C SSD thumb drives with speeds of 1000 MB/s. They're SSDs though, not flash memory, but they are thumb drives, not big boxes.
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How hot do these things get? I have a few "bar" type USB sticks that get quite warm after even moderate amounts of data transfer.
How hot is "quite warm"? And how hot is too hot?
From my own observation: Anything over 40C or so feels quite warm to my own touch, but 40C is generally rather insignificant to a solid-state IC.
At around 120C or so lead solder can become weaker, and this temperature is forbidden in devices that experience vibration or other perturbations. Unleaded solders can handle higher temperatures. All consumer products today are RoHS 6 and so do not have lead.
It would not surprise me if a heavily written ss device in an unventilated environment, such a laptop on a bed with a blanket covering it, or left operating in a bag, could get close to such a temperature on the PCBA. It would also dissipate heat to the USB connector of the laptop, possibly weakening it as well.
Looks like there are some data and guidelines are in ISO 13732-1:2006. $250ish per download, as well as probably available in the company intranet/local city library for free access.
With how short the drive is, I think the USB port and the rest of your pc’s motherboard will act as a heatsink for the drive.
Is it compatible with Linux? The official store page doesn't mention the "Linux" word at all.
USB mass storage is compatible with Linux. SANDISK Memory Zone™ is not.
I think it looks cool, despite what the haters here say. And does no one use desktops anymore?
Durability is more important of capacity+size. Something flash drives are not known for in general.
I had one of these break within a few days of purchase. It's a no for me.
Hmm these tiny things tend to get hella hot for me :(
Better a bigger one.
When I was studying at university, I had the highest-capacity USB drive of its time, which was 64mb. I was able to fit all my Word documents and some extras, and still felt huge. I can't find a reason for anyone to use a tiny flash drive and store 1tb info on it. It is too risky to store anything important without a backup. Versioning is also an issue and must be synced somewhere all the time. I thought we were over flash drives already. I only use flash drives for installing fresh distros on old computers. Can't find a reason to use them anymore.
I used SanDisk Cruzer Fit https://amzn.to/47OqNXT for a very long time (USB 2.0) for ESXi server installations too. Never had a problem. But this "new" design looks terrible.
Backup drive is my use-case. But that means a mountain of sustained write traffic, which means thermals are important, which is where this thing sucks. I had been using a regular external with a short cable, until I got a Framework and decided to try one of their "fits in the module slot" SSDs, which is perfect.
I still pop it out after the backup and store it elsewhere, but it's lovely that during the backup job (which can take a while if it's doing a fresh copy), it's completely unobtrusive and can't break off if I set the lappy down wrong.
Maybe they have a GoPro and want to be able to do some basic 4K video manipulation. Or want to download some warez or porn, or use it as a backup drive, etc.
1TB is enough space to be actually useful for some of this, and if you have a somewhat older laptop, it might only have 256GB or 512GB internal.
Using ventoy and having multiple rescue/install images on one flash drive is super nice. I have a Windows 2 go installation on it too.