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USB Stick BUFFALO (JP) - Question for a tech personSubmitted by nomnex on June 13, 2009 - 3:57am
I need a new stick. It is not much about the price, but the usability/reliability/longevity/transfer speed. It is a Buffalo USB 2, Japanese model, either 8GB, either 16GB. What do you think? I would tend to select the 16 GB. 30 MB/s data transfert / 8 GB / 4000 JPY or 30 MB/s data transfer / 16GB / 7500 JPY http://buffalo.jp/products/catalog/flash/ruf2-lvs-bk/ (30 MB/s) Q1: is the life span of a USB shorter than a HD? http://buffalo.jp/products/catalog/flash/ruf2-rvs-sv/ (38 MB/s) Q5: for double price - ouch! - see the link above - there is the same USB with 38 MB/s data speed. Is it worthy (read the question as: does the speed increase that much)? Thanks for your advice. ( categories: )
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Numbers first. Google says ¥4000 = $40.72 and ¥7500 = $76.34. That is insane. I paid about $30 for my 16GB flash drive, and it's a Corsair. Generally, you don't beat Corsairs, but if those drives you are looking at can do the speed they say, well, they'll beat my current and last Corsair - the last one was a 4GB model I got for $12 shipped. But that's America; if you're overseas somewhere, I guess you may have to pay higher prices. Still, see if Newegg.com will ship to you. Air mail can't be that much. I bought a paperback from Amazon.co.uk that was £4.99 and paid about $25. So look into that.
You only need 16GB if you're getting into video. A 4GB drive can hold a ton of apps, and some video. 8GB should be fine. With 16GB you can carry a few movies at full DVD quality, maybe a couple Blu-Rays in Matroska format.
As for your numbered questions:
1. Not sure on life vs. hard drives. Having no moving parts and something called wear leveling that spreads the data across the surface tends to indicate they last longer. Corsair likes to claim that you can boil or freeze their drives, and once they're dried out completely, they work good as new. You can't say that about a hard drive. Also, you can't get a hard drive wet.
2. The size shouldn't, no; however larger drives tend to have slower access times. If they both list the same speed, maybe it doesn't matter for those.
3. 480Mb/s is the speed of the USB 2.0 protocol. And remember that is megabits per second, not megabytes per second. There are 8 bits in a byte, so that is really only 60MB/s. If the drive is listed at 30Mb (3.75MB) that is what it will do. Now, if you go and stick it in a USB 1.1 port, with a bandwidth of 12MB/s (1.5MB/s) it will do that. In the former case, your flash drive is the bottleneck; in the latter, it's the port.
4. No clue.
5. Well, I'm already appalled at the prices you're talking about paying. 30Mb/s is very good if the device can actually deliver it. 38Mb/s would certainly be faster (still under the 480Mb/s limit, so you'd get all 38), coming in at 4.75MB/s. You might value that extra speed if you're moving big movies around.
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buffalo is known as fine brand
>Q1: is the life span of a USB shorter than a HD?<
depends on, if you move hard drive often, it may brak sooner then the flash, but the flash has by design some problems. However all flash sticks produced an designed in let say last 3 years have very good long life performance if used sensibly.
The connector of the stick will break before the memory inside. The connector itself is specified for 500 insertion cycles by standard, mostly made with higher spec today with 1500 insertion cycles.
Q2: does the size make any difference about reliability or longevity?
no, apart from the fact, that smaller units , let say 512Mb were produced some 5 years ago, might have weaker wear leveling algorithms in it and thus less reliability
What is more important:
NAND flash comes in two varieties:
Single Level Cell = high reliability and often high speed too, more expensive
Multi Level Cell = lower reliability and different speeds, cheap, consumer type of things.
Q3: what's the data transfer of 30 MB/s - labeled on the box - vs the USB speed of 480 MB/s?
As stated correct allready, the speed of USB2 is still higher then any standard flash today. Portable HD will be faster in that moment.
Q4: Is it a good practice and does it increase reliability to change the FAT file system to NTFS on a 16 GB USB? - I would definitely do it on a USB HDD with correct NTFS permissions set.
The reliability is today , at least with single level cells so hight that it does not matter in fact any more so much.
But one has to see that NTFS and any other journaling file systems write much more to the medial then standard FAT/FAT32 systems. Any write action does in fact produce the feared wear of the cells, so NTFS and similar systems (journaling systems of Linux for example) are not favorable for use on flash memories.
In addition, it also depends on how the media is formated. To have access rights on a portable media is rather problematic, such flash is not portable any more, it works only on the machine and user account for which this rights were created. For that, windows will for example omit the rights management on devices recognized by windows as removable, thought the file system is still NTFS.
An external HD can be formated in full NFTS, but then the rights will apply and such drive is no more portable. But this has to be formated by special utils or inserted into a computer as normal drive and then formated usual way. When the drive is connected as external drive in an usb adapter for example, it will be also formated with the no security switch by windows, since it will be recognized as removable drive this way, with rights omitted.
Q5
can not read the text, so can not say sure, but if they offer single level cell unit go for that rather then little bit faster multilevel cell.
As I say, Buffalo is known as one of the major suppliers of sticks with single level cell technology and very high speeds.
(if this is the original supplier and not some fake??)
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Thanks to both of you for
Thanks to both of you for your answers, I will make good use of the information. That's correct I live overseas. FIY you can't purchase electronics overseas with a local credit card. It is a commercial agreement among country blocks to protect their market. It is a problem when you are expatriate and you need a notebook or OS in your native language.
@NathanJ79
I have little CPU power at disposal to do audio conversion in batch. Since my music collection is lossless (Mainly FLAC), I guess 16 GB could be the solution if I want to take some music on the go. I am pondering the trade off between copying/deleting big files vs. a lossy compression (so in the end 2 files: lossless/lossy for a same album). Wave Pack could be the solution, but it would imply re-encoding everything with this codec.
@Otto
1500 insertions should be achieve within 2 years (I expect 4 years of use). Can I use another connector on the top of the USB's default - to extent its life? I have seen very short USB wire extender (about 5-10 cm. long). what do you think? There should be not lose of speed.
NTFS and any other journaling file systems write much more to the medial then standard FAT/FAT32 systems. Any write action does in fact produce the feared wear of the cells, so NTFS and similar systems (journaling systems of Linux for example) are not favorable for use on flash memories.
I will keep FAT system file on the USB.
To have access rights on a portable media is rather problematic.
Correct, but not if you set the proper NTFS permission on the formatted drive. Access: Everybody, Owner: Everybody. it does defeat the purpose of security, but NTFS increases stability on large volume, e.g. an external fix USB Drive Station. Not to mention a better cluster size management and the ability to preserve the metadata of the files. FAT is better on the perspective of compatibility, but it very old. Imagine a 32k cluster on a 250 GB FAT partition for mix data content. What a loss.
>Correct, but not if you set
>Correct, but not if you set the proper NTFS permission on the formatted drive. Access: Everybody, Owner: Everybody. it does defeat the purpose of security, but NTFS increases stability on large volume, e.g. an external fix USB Drive Station. Not to mention a better cluster size management and the ability to preserve the metadata of the files. FAT is better on the perspective of compatibility, but it very old. Imagine a 32k cluster on a 250 GB FAT partition for mix data content. What a loss.<
yes, but as I say, it is not that simple to produce full NTFS formating on external drive. It does not work just by plug and play. If you connect an external drive to your computer, format it, then it is formated without security in general, so you might not notice anything, appart from it tells you it is NTFS.
And yes, it gives sense on hard drives, this is what it was developed for.
And yes, one can format also a flash with NTFS and full rights management. But this is not some single step process , it needs to flip the removable bit in the flash controller, which is not simple task already for most sticks on the market. Then make proper formating etc and still the portability will be problematic. There needs to be full read write access all the time, the apps need to write and create and delete files , so all is not impossible, but still complex to be maintained over all accounts and occasions.
On the other hand, the way flash does store information you dont need too much to bother about clusters and similar things, the file system we can read with our computers is only virtual , just to make it compatible with our computer operating systems. The storage is organized in completely different manner, many thing of it are proprietary of the manufacturer. The zones and sectors have different meaning there and all is split and put together according the complex wear leveling procedures.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I bought it today
Thanks Otto, it makes sens. Does your information worth for the new steady state disks for notebooks? Would you recommend such disk vs. a tradition 2.5 HD (I will have to change notebook soon)
PS: is it realistic to extend my USB connector's life by adding a short USB wire extension?
Anyway, I just purchased the Buffalo USB 16 G, it is pretty large/long compared to my 4 years old USB stick (500 MB). I will install my portable apps anytime soon. The USB is packed with some software in Japanese I have no use. I will format it using the XP formatting tool in FAT32
Additional question:
Does fragmentation affect USB sticks in the same manner as it does on traditional disks?
Don't
Do not defragment a flash drive as it will significantly decrease the life of the drive. Just what I've heard.
I was going to suggest a portable hard drive since you insist on porting FLACs around with you everywhere, but with 16GB you should be able to carry a few albums.
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ok
> Does your information worth for the new steady state disks for notebooks? Would you recommend such disk vs. a tradition 2.5 HD (I will have to change notebook soon)<
I have not one myself, so I can not say exactly what functions they did include in their controller. Also I dont know if they use MAND cells or some NOR cells, in which case all behaves quite different.
>PS: is it realistic to extend my USB connector's life by adding a short USB wire extension?<
yes sure, but do not bother too much abt it, next year you will buy an other stick since by then the capacity of those items will increase and price decrease...
>Additional question:
Does fragmentation affect USB sticks in the same manner as it does on traditional disks?<
as stated, defrag is pure nonsense. All you can defrag is the file system of your operating system partition. It has absolutely nothing to do with positioning the data bits on the flash chip. You have no access to the file system of the flash and thus you can not defrag it with what ever. All you do with the windows/dos defrag of any flavor is to send commands 'copy this to ram, delete this from the file system, copy this back to the file system'. Where the data are actually stored is not transparent for you and you have no access to gain this information.
And if you place data in your windows file system close together to make something faster, they might be on opposite ends of the chip in the flash. And eve this does not matter, since flash do not use common address and data bus known of other storage systems, the use so called multiplexed bus to make things smaller and it apparently assist the manufacturer also in creating better wear leveling algos.
While the extra write cycles caused by the defrag are getting less and less an issue with latest chips, the single level flash have sometimes data warranty for 25years!, it is completely useless at least.
It is the same nonsense like the old urban story about defragging the RAM...
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
> All you can defrag is the
> All you can defrag is the file system of your operating system partition. It has absolutely nothing to do with positioning the data bits on the flash chip. You have no access to the file system of the flash and thus you can not defrag it with what ever
Clear!
Once again thanks to all for your answers *special mention to Otto*. I suffer a disease - there is no treatment. From time to time, when crisis occur, I cannot attend a PC for a period of time ranging from 1 to 2 months. Anyway, I am better now and I am reading/answering all my posts in stand-by. Thanks for your understanding and see you on the board for additional questions.
PS: (another answer) yes, I do have a portable HDD 80 GB Buffalo PHSU2 for the Flac files, but as you said, but a USB with 16GB capacity is much lighter. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.