Jump/thumbdrive?

Question

I want to get my boyfriend a jump/thumbdrive for Christmas. Just to store and transfer pictures with and stuff like that. What size should I get that is reasonably priced? And is there any brand you would recommend?

Answer 1

if its just small picture filel and small word files i would go woth something like a 265mb flash drive that shoud be sufficent space, and the brand i recomend most is sandisk, there reassonablly priced

Answer 2

There are several flavors of jump drives, I would get it from www.newegg.com, but I wouldn't wait for ordering it.

There are 2 things you have to take into consideration:

The speed: the time it takes for the thumbdrive to write things to, and read. Generally, thats marked as megabytes per second. I was just surfing newegg and I grabbed this info from a 21$ 1GB Kingston thumbdrive:

"data transfer rates of up to 6 MB/sec. read and up to 3 MB/sec write".

That in my opinion is quite slow, supposing you have to copy a 700MB movie from your hard drive into the thumbdrive, it would take 700 divided 3 = 233 seconds, (translates to 3 minutes, 53 seconds. theoretical value, it could be worst)

While in my opinion, this other drive I just found in newegg, the Corsair voyager 4GB, claims:
"Speed: 31MB/S read, 15MB/S write"

which is much better, it would take 700/15 = 46 seconds, that's a lot faster!
Of course, don't forget that you'll need an USB 2.0 port in your PC/MAC, new machines all got 2.0 ports, while my old compaq presario got USB1.1 which are much slower transfering data.

I would also check what people says about a particular thumbdrive, hopefully, most reviews at newegg are ok. Corsair, Kingston, PNY, OCZ makes all good products, there could be much more good brands that I can't remember now...


Then we have the capacity:
1GB - a little more than a CD
2GB - less than half single layer DVD
4GB - almost a single layer DVD, these got the perfect megabytes per dollar ratio, but the speedy ones are expensive.
8GB - almost a double layer DVD.

There are also 16GB ones, but let's not exagerate...they are expensive and bulky, I would prefer getting 4 thumbdrives of 4GB each instead of that 16GB one...

Hope this helps...

Answer 3

Simpletech Bonzai at Buy.com. Cost me like 15 bucks, shipped. Uses an SD card. You're only limited by card size that way. Plugs into any USB port, and shows up as a removable hard drive. Switch between computers, computer/camera, computer/laptop, etc. anything that has a USB port.

They went up a bit:

http://www.buy.com/prod/simpletech_bonzai_usb_2_0_flash_drive_memory_usb_adapter/q/loc/101/10359490.html

Answer 4

I work in IT and have used well over 20 different drives of various brands. Most of them use the same components inside(usually samsung chips) so the cheap ones tend to be just as good as the branded ones

Answer 5

I have half dozen, different brands, only buy on sale. So far I have found one to be as good as the other.

This week our local paper advertised 1G for $20. That's not bad. It gets more pricey as you go to 2G, 4G. ... Watch the ads and try going to www.bizrate.com and run a search. You will get a list of retailers listed by price.

Answer 6

Best buy has a three pack of Jumpdrive brand of 1gb drives for $50.

Answer 7

Well i am not sure if you have a MicroCenter near you, they have a 1GB drive for sale. I bought one for only 16 bucks. They have a load of sales going on.

Answer 8

Images take a lot of space...I just bought my third one, a 2 gig, for
$33.00....the prices have plummeted on these things!
Check out
nothingbutsofware.com

Answer 9

Don't settle for less than 1 GB, it just isn't worth it. I have several (Cruzer, Memorex, Kensington) All work fine with no troubles.

Answer 10

1.0 gb flash drive