| Recent
Articles |
Gmail Storage Ticks Upward, Lags Yahoo, AOL
Google has given the storage counter for Gmail a little boost to its spin, but believe it or not they could be doing more. Not very long ago, storage on web-based email measured in the megabytes, and not very many....
Virtually New York City
Yes I'm a Sox fan. Yes I'm a Pats fan. I also love New York City - not the teams, but the City. Where else on earth can it take 2 hours to go 12 blocks in a cab because the psychotic President of Iran was in town...
When You Lose Your Photos On Your Memory Card
So there I was on a Friday night shooting down at Mike Arrington's biggest Web 2.0 tech meet and greet of the year, TechCrunch 9. After filling up one 8 GB card I went to my car to get my second 8 GB card and also to...
The Best Thing To Happen To Networked Storag...
VMware might be the best thing that's happened to networked storage since, well, networked storage. So you think EMC bought VMware because it was cheap? At $635 million, it didn't seem cheap at the time; many...
Microsoft Looks Into The Cloud
The favorite of Googlite war cry formats has been to pair up a Microsoft product with the word "killer": Windows-killer; Office-killer; [Insert product here]-killer. Google's free, advertising-based software-as-a-service...
Online Data Storage & Backup Eliminates Weather...
Long ago, the successful sale of whatever widgets a company offered wasn’t much affected one way or another by weather. In today’s electronic business world, though, violent weather can wreak havoc with threats...
|
|
|
| Recent WebProNews Articles |
Live Search Continues Down Relevance Road
The Live Search team at Microsoft has been working on making their centerpiece product more effective at recognizing equivalences, and knowing when 'the' needs to be part of the query. Live Search team, where...
Who Has 'Metaphysical Jurisdiction' In Second Life?
Before the end of this sentence you will have to make a choice between the blue pill and the red pill, for as soon as we step over the period we will enter an alternate reality and it will not be easy. Lawyers are looking...
When You Lose Your Photos On Your Memory Card
So there I was on a Friday night shooting down at Mike Arrington's biggest Web 2.0 tech meet and greet of the year, TechCrunch 9. After filling up one 8 GB card...
Your Search Ad: No Search, But You Paid Google
When is a search ad click not really a click? According to Richard Ball of Apogee Web Consulting, it's when someone clicks an ad on a parked domain to reach a site. So why is Google charging for these as ad...
Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad?
Another under-the-radar-of-the-real-world blog firestorm erupted yesterday over high profile page rank drops. Google dropped visible PR of many blogs and mainstream news sites presumably as a penalty...
Microsoft Needs Live Search On Facebook
Shelling out $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook may be Microsoft's way of keeping Google away from the social networking site, but the deal may not be worth the money unless Microsft can get...
|
|
|
|
10.29.07
The Corsair 8GB "Survivor" GT Thumb Drive
 By Dave Taylor
It was less than a year ago that I bought a 256MB thumb drive and thought "man, lots of space, that'll be handy". In fact, I added my keys and made it my keychain.
Then I decided it was too small and upgraded to a Lexar "Jump Drive" with an impressive 512MB of space coupled with some encryption software that would ensure that if I lost the drive, I wouldn't be out of luck.
Problem is, unless you have incredible personal discipline, it becomes quickly obvious that it's useful to have more space, not less, and just like modern housebuying, while it's impossible to have too much space, it certainly is possible to have too little.
As a result, when Corsair contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in looking at their 8GB "Survivor" flash drive, I quickly assented: 8GB sounded like enough space that it could actually be
useful.
After using it for a few months, I am pleased to report that it's a great little flash drive with a rugged (and amusing) form factor.
Though I am still unsure why it would be important, the Corsair Survivor flash drives are made with anodized aircraft-grade aluminum (you could drive a car over one of these babies without it being hurt) and are water resistant to 200 meters, along with being vibration and impact resistant through a shock-dampening collar on the device.
 As you can see in the product picture on the right, it's basically an aluminum canister that unscrews on one end and the traditional thin rectangular drive itself is encased within. Safe, tough, still small enough to slip into a pocket or purse, and 8GB, well, that's a sweet amount of space, I'll say that. It's also fully USB 2.0 compatible, which means that transfer speeds should never be an issue (though I have seen it slow down sometimes on transfers on my Mac, so I'm not entirely sure what that's about. Nothing too ridiculous because it's so easy to do something else while waiting, but it's definitely not a Firewire unit)
One of the annoyances with any USB flash drive / thumb drive (what are these things supposed to be called anyway??) is that the advertised size is not the same as the available space. On a little guy of 512MB or 1GB, that's a significant issue, but as the units get bigger, the approx 10% taken up by disk formatting and layout become less of an issue. With the Corsair Flash Survivor GT 8GB, I see over 7.5GB of space, as you can see here:
The only possible limitation: it kind of looks like some sort of small weapon or bomb or something, so I keep expecting someone in airport security to get jumpy and ask me to prove it's a computer storage device... If only it had a camouflage option! I will say that people are constantly amused when they see the device, until they realize I can throw it out the window of my car and it'll work just fine when we recover it.
That's about all there is to say about this device. Flash drives are a classic example of a commodity computing product, and like anything else storage-related, bigger is always better. The Corsair Survivor is a terrific unit and a good addition to the arsenal of any road warrior or student.
The unit price? It's not cheap: Amazon supplies it through Tiger Direct at $179.99. The new 16GB unit, non-GT (meaning it's slower) is only $20 more at Amazon, at $199.99.
Yes, that's expensive for a flash drive, but never having to worry about sitting on it, someone stepping on your backpack or even spilling a glass of water on it? Potentially priceless. :-)
Comments
About the Author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.
AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/
|
