Item — HN Reader

> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028.

More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.

Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16474735

4 comments

> Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?

Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g. Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress support on their recent models of higher priced camera systems). Prices are very high, but that's justifiable IMO - unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up with the performance and endurance that professional equipment demands.

[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicursam...

[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicmulti...

There is more than a 10x price difference between slow run-of-the-mill sd cards and the high speed cards a photographer might go for. Why would it be any different for thumb drives? Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve and make up a small fraction of the total demand. And to make it worse people who need speed tend to be less price sensitive.

I ran into this sort of issue with the Steam Deck, too. Initially ordered a slower-but-still-recommended cheaper SD card. Figured I could deal with the slower write speeds as that should just mean slower downloads.

I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.

Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but every part of the experience saw a dramatic improvement after I switched to a higher-spec SD card.

Just watch the video on disassembly and install a m.2. So much faster than an sd card. Its a 5/10 fiddly i hear. Ive yet to open mine but I bought the baller option. My steam controller was reasonably easy with a small plastic tool for prying, also available as automotive trim removers cheaply.

> 10x price difference ... Why would it be any different for thumb drives?

I'm more concerned with the reliability (in my experience). The middle-priced ones are not necessarily better than the cheapest ones.

> Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve

I'm not asking for 1000 MB/s write speed. Why do I still sometimes get 10MB/s in 2023? Is it much to expect around 100 MB/s write (HDD-level speeds) in most "average" thumb-drive?

Some are much better than others. Where I work we have some embedded systems in lab that can only program from USB. We are constantly reprogramming them, so we go through a lot of USB drives. The cheap ones last maybe a week in the lab, we have found one that will last for months - they cost 5 times as much, but last at least 20 times longer.

My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds.

Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.

The quality of these things has really gone down as they've gotten commoditized, it seems.

I'd give it about a 1% chance that it's actually bad flash drives, and a 99% chance it's Sophos.

Fair. It also loves to do full system scans at the worst time and send my fans to full throttle.