DIYbanter - OT 1TB USB Sticks

Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:
There are 1tb sticks, but I've heard reliability is an issue. Also if you
are thinking about filling it with music, be careful a lot of devices don't
like them as they are too big and formatted intents format too. I don't
know if they can be partitioned to allow them to look like more than one
drive. In Windows this works but lots of media players and recorders use
weird formats not supported by these sticks.
Brian

Windows 10 may have gained some ability to support multiple
primary partitions on a USB stick.

But then, if you have some other version
of Windows booted, only the first recognized partition
will be accessible, the others get ignored.

Linux is a bit better in this regard. You're more likely to
be able to see and access the partitions.

There's no problem with *genuine* USB flash sticks 1TB in size.
Since no one can afford the genuine ones, all we're getting
is reports concerning the shabby performance of the
*counterfeit* ones.

I checked the Kingston store earlier, and while Kingston
has released press releases stating they have larger drives,
the store only shows a 512GB one for sale.

Other makers of so-called genuine materials, at least
one of them wanted $1650 for the product, which is like
80x the price on Ebay for a counterfeit one. It should be
relatively easy to determine you've been had, just based
on price. Some of the smaller genuine USB sticks are
$265, which is still 13x the price of a counterfeit item.

The counterfeit sellers are so lazy, they don't even
double the counterfeit price, when going from 1TB USB
to 2TB USB. The additional cost is small, because all
they're doing is typing a different number into their
counterfeit stamper software. The fun stops, when the
register inside the device, runs out of bits for storage.
It's possible the end is 2TB because of a 32 bit register
limit. They would be assigning even larger numbers,
if the controller chip supported such scams.

As for the reliability of USB Flash, sticks based on
MLC chips (around 8GB max) are excellent. Modern TLC
based Flash sticks are not all that good. This is
one reason I would not be spending $1650 for a
"genuine" USB TLC flash stick, when a 1TB SSD with MLC
inside is available for a quarter of the price.
You can then hang a USB3 to SATA cable off it, and
make a USB flash drive out of your purchase.

Paul