Best flash drive?

[ndrake]

Does anyone have any flash drive recommendations? The 4GB cheapy one I got at Target is almost full and I want to get a larger one for the Arch Linux ARM. Anyone have a favorite brand/model that is reliable and fast?

Thanks!

[WarheadsSE]

I just buy PNY's, they're fairly cheap, and I've never had an issue with any of them that was a hardware problem.

[kmihelich]

A USB hard drive will give you the best reliability, and more space per dollar.

[Frex]

I would recommend against Kingston because of their warranty, just 1y, but I am biased since a 16 GB stick died on me after about 13 months of light use.

I've been looking at Transcend, they offer a lifetime (albeit limited) warranty and the 6xx series is advertised for 32 MB/s read, 18 MB/s write. Amazon has them for about the same price of the slower models - but I still haven't had the chance to test them myself.

[haiku]

Hello,
It might be a good idea to inventorize compatible and no-compatible flash drives, here's for me :
- Transcend V30 2GB OK
- Transcend Jetflash 620 8GB NOK

[tritron]

Did anyone try microcenter usbdrives. I seen 16gb for 20 and 8gb for 10.

[slycat]

If it helps:
PNY 2gb (found it on the floor at work ) Model: P-FD2GX2/BLREDBTS-EF
Sandisk 8gb Cruzer (2007 version)

Used a Transcend 2gb SD card w/ USB-bug and that worked too (slow, but it worked)

[kmihelich]

Generally speaking, all drives will work. Remove any U3 or similar crap that comes with it and you're fine. It's also helpful to zeroize the partition table before creating new partitions. This is accomplished with 'cfdisk -z' or the 'o' command to fdisk. With the exception of the flash just wearing out, which will happen, the only thing that is needed in some cases is to increase the rootdelay value passed to the kernel from uboot, or to swap out rootdelay=X with rootwait so that the kernel will simply wait indefinitely for the device to be recognized.

[haiku]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kmihelich', '.').This is accomplished with 'cfdisk -z' or the 'o' command to fdisk..

[kmihelich]

You might need a longer rootdelay like I mentioned, or use rootwait instead.