I have been on Amazon trying to find a couple of 500gb Flash Drives, I am sure that I found them this morning but an MS update forced the closure of my PC and now I can't find them. When I search using '500GB Portable Flash Drive' it displays external portable hard drives, is that the same thing, or would they need an O/S on them to work?
Steve http://www.freightpro-uk.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
500GB is much bigger than any flash drive that I have ever come across, unless you are looking for an SSD drive. You can get 500GB solid state disk drives but the cost is very very high.
The largest thumb drive I remembered seeing recently is 32GB, so I just looked on Amazon and it's a Kingston for which they want $50 US.
My goodness, I just recently bought a Toshiba 500GB external USB while I was repairing a friend's laptop and paid "only" $65 US for that.
By the way, Steve, the above would be just as suitable as a thumb drive as it was very thin and easily shirt pocket size (except of course for the short USB cable that came with it).
Large USB (-2) Flash drives are agonisingly slow to write. If you were trying to write the whole of a 500 GB USB Flash Drive, at 20 MB/s it would take about 25,000 seconds or 7 hours. Yawn...
The largest USB Flash Drives I can find are 128GB ones.
John Gray
"(or one of the team)" - how your appointment letter indicates you won't be seeing the Consultant...
If I did use an external USB hard drive would it need an operating system or will it just work like a thumb drive where I can make folders and place all of my music, DVD's, office documents etc. onto it for easy use / retirval?
This is the kind of thing I am looking at ADATA 500gb
TIA
Steve http://www.freightpro-uk.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
An external USB hard drive does NOT need its own operating system, you should just be able to plug it in and use it in the same way as you would use a thumb drive.
If I did use an external USB hard drive would it need an operating system or will it just work like a thumb drive where I can make folders and place all of my music, DVD's, office documents etc. onto it for easy use / retirval?
This is the kind of thing I am looking at ADATA 500gb
TIA
Thanks again Hans & Stuart
It's strange because I posted an edit to the above about 1/2 an hour later to say that I had found a Freecom 1 TB drive for £59 that had good reviews and one of them said it could be used without an O/S so I took the plunge.
Steve http://www.freightpro-uk.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
I think the subject of your thread put us on the wrong foot. A USB flash drive is a very specific storage medium. Currently, 256 GB is the largest "common" size, and the first 512 GB flash drives are very expensive. Cheap high-capacity flash drives are often fakes from a large East Asian country...
Apparently you are/were looking for an external USB hard disk; those come in larger storage sizes and at a much lower price than flash drives, but they are bulkier.
For a USB-connected external hard drive there are two basic types:
a) those which require two USB sockets (on PC or laptop) to provide data connectivity and power - their capacity is usually less than 750 GB
b) those which have a mains power 'brick' to provide power, and use one USB socket on the PC or laptop for data connectivity - their capacity can go up to 3 TB
You need to look at the specifications closely if you want a capacity between (say) 320 GB and 1 TB to determine whether a specific hard drive works only from USB sockets or has a separate power supply.
Some of the lower-capacity and USB-connection-only external hard drives are called 'slimline', because they contain a 2½" laptop-type hard drive, rather than the normal-sized 3½" hard drive. The slimline drives usually run at 5400 rpm, whereas the larger ones usually run at 7200 rpm.
John Gray
"(or one of the team)" - how your appointment letter indicates you won't be seeing the Consultant...
I have been on Amazon trying to find a couple of 500gb Flash Drives, I am sure that I found them this morning but an MS update forced the closure of my PC and now I can't find them. When I search using '500GB Portable Flash Drive' it displays external portable hard drives, is that the same thing, or would they need an O/S on them to work?
Thanks for all that contributed to this post
A quick update. I bit the bullet and bought a couple of Freecom 1TB drives that work great but are powered. Then today in my inbox I receiv an offer from BT for Iomega 1TB USB powered drives >_ _ _ IOMEGA
Steve http://www.freightpro-uk.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
General rule of thumb is:
3 1/2" drives need a power supply.
2 1/2" drives are powered from the USB port, some needing to be plugged into two ports with a double headed lead.
