Somebody in the thread at some point said: > I keep circling around the idea that for a little solid state thing like > a thumb drive, for only $60-70, it is probably worth the risk to buy a > cheap one. I am considering buying one just to test it out. > > Anyone ever used one of the cheap ones off eBay? Generally they're fine, but they can be slow to write to. The flash drives are meant to have a "wear-leveling" algorithm which moves around the physical sector chosen to store the stuff written to a logical sector. This "spreads out the load" if a program starts banging on the same logical sector over and over, for example, the sector that holds the first bit of / directory. Whether the super cheapo ones implement that in a good, or indeed any, way is open to question. If you look around you can get really cheap ones at half the price of the brand ones or better. If neither speed nor data security is a problem and you don't mind blowing the money in the worst case I would definitely buy the no-name ones. -Andy
