History 2000: Flash as Floppy Replacement

We’ve already mentioned those minuscule flash memory devices that may be directly attached to a USB port. These units, some no bigger than a car key or a pack of chewing gum, are easily transferable between computers without in theory requiring drivers and thus may be used as a removable storage device in place of a floppy disk drive.

Of course, it’s much more expensive than an FDD, but also much smaller, with no moving parts, drawing what little power it needs directly from the USB port.

Capacity of these tiny flash appliances can range as high as 2GB, but the cost of flash is still much higher than magnetic memory.

Transfer rates for flash memory are also fairly slow: generally 350KB/s in write, twice that in read. For those who need speed, there are small CompactFlash II drives with USB connections that take IBM’s 1GB Microdrive.

At least 4 companies were offering the miniature flash drives in Las Vegas, NV, all fairly close in specs:

• Ei Corp., a subsidiary of the Milpitas, CA-based Agate Technologies, demonstrated its Q drive.
• Trek 2000 International of Singapore showed off its Thumbdrive Pro, ranging from 256MB to 2.1GB, at a cost of around $2/MB.
• Q-Tek International is the US distributor of a product apparently manufactured by the Korean Myung Telecom and known as the flash USB drive, from 16MB to 1GB ($399 for 128MB, more than $1,500 for 1GB). The drive was announced as slightly faster than its competitors: 500KB/s write, 800KB/s read.
• Flash disk maker M-Systems has its own product, DiskOnKey, at 8, 16 or 32MB, which IBM in fact offers as an option to its customers, under the name Memory Key.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 155 on December 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.