What Is The Best Portable Media Storage Device?

[Bleipriester]

Put it in the cloud

Clouds are useless, if you have no Internet at your destination. I signed up at Pogoplug a while ago and now they are going off. So if you you miss the window to save your files for some reason, hospital or whatever, they are simply gone. It is now the second storage service I have used that goes off.

 

[Bleipriester]

USB is more universal, that is the largest difference for me. You can go anywhere and USB will be available where SD card readers are far less likely. If you are only dealing with your own devices then such is irrelevant. USB is also far cheaper in my experience but that may have changed considering all the portable devices that use SD cards now.

I would expect the data stored on the chips to have longevity equal to or slightly better than that stored on USB thumb drives.My concern, however, is availability of the means to access the data a few years down the road. Chip readers in off-the-shelf computers are of more recent origin than USB ports so may be around a bit longer. Plus there are plenty of chip readers that can plug into various ports on computers and adapters can be cascaded when (not "if") USB ports are no longer standard.

I base this on seeing vast libraries of 2" video tape for which there are precious few VTRs left functional to play them back and copy them to newer formats.

I would not expect SD formats to outlast USB. Virtually everything is USB these days - it will stick around for decades. Every single computer has USB access, every phone charges through USB and essentially every device that has a SD card in it also has a USB connection. This is not true in the reverse. There are also several versions of chips.

USB is not going anywhere. SD cards will likely last a long time as well but they will disappear if a newer, better version cones out.

I've lost data on my USB drives a couple of times. Never on my SD cards that were in my camera. Luckily I had cloud backup.

It can happen to any storage. For example if you remove a card form your phone while data is being transfered you risk to destroy the card.

 

[Bleipriester]

USB is more universal, that is the largest difference for me. You can go anywhere and USB will be available where SD card readers are far less likely. If you are only dealing with your own devices then such is irrelevant. USB is also far cheaper in my experience but that may have changed considering all the portable devices that use SD cards now.

I would expect the data stored on the chips to have longevity equal to or slightly better than that stored on USB thumb drives.My concern, however, is availability of the means to access the data a few years down the road. Chip readers in off-the-shelf computers are of more recent origin than USB ports so may be around a bit longer. Plus there are plenty of chip readers that can plug into various ports on computers and adapters can be cascaded when (not "if") USB ports are no longer standard.

I base this on seeing vast libraries of 2" video tape for which there are precious few VTRs left functional to play them back and copy them to newer formats.

I would not expect SD formats to outlast USB. Virtually everything is USB these days - it will stick around for decades. Every single computer has USB access, every phone charges through USB and essentially every device that has a SD card in it also has a USB connection. This is not true in the reverse. There are also several versions of chips.

USB is not going anywhere. SD cards will likely last a long time as well but they will disappear if a newer, better version cones out.

Technically the most portable storage device is cloud storage, you can pretty much access your files anywhere from any device that has internet capabilities. As for the positives and negatives, that usually depends on each person.

I think important data should be backed up in several ways. Disk, Flash, HDD, Cloud.

 

[Ringel05]

USB is more universal, that is the largest difference for me. You can go anywhere and USB will be available where SD card readers are far less likely. If you are only dealing with your own devices then such is irrelevant. USB is also far cheaper in my experience but that may have changed considering all the portable devices that use SD cards now.

I would expect the data stored on the chips to have longevity equal to or slightly better than that stored on USB thumb drives.My concern, however, is availability of the means to access the data a few years down the road. Chip readers in off-the-shelf computers are of more recent origin than USB ports so may be around a bit longer. Plus there are plenty of chip readers that can plug into various ports on computers and adapters can be cascaded when (not "if") USB ports are no longer standard.

I base this on seeing vast libraries of 2" video tape for which there are precious few VTRs left functional to play them back and copy them to newer formats.

I would not expect SD formats to outlast USB. Virtually everything is USB these days - it will stick around for decades. Every single computer has USB access, every phone charges through USB and essentially every device that has a SD card in it also has a USB connection. This is not true in the reverse. There are also several versions of chips.

USB is not going anywhere. SD cards will likely last a long time as well but they will disappear if a newer, better version cones out.

Technically the most portable storage device is cloud storage, you can pretty much access your files anywhere from any device that has internet capabilities. As for the positives and negatives, that usually depends on each person.

I think important data should be backed up in several ways. Disk, Flash, HDD, Cloud.

All of my important data is in paper form in a fireproof safe.

 

[FA_Q2]

USB is more universal, that is the largest difference for me.

With adapters you can turn a Micro SD Card into a larger SD Card and even into a USB drive. This is why SD cards are more universal.

Universal does not mean that you can use adapters to eventually get it there.
Universal refers to how common the connection is. USB is massively common. SD simply is not past specific mobile devices like cameras and phones.

 

[Lewdog]

I bought a 32gb USB drive from Walmart on sale this past week for less than $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I should have gotten 2.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Put it in the cloud

Clouds are useless, if you have no Internet at your destination. I signed up at Pogoplug a while ago and now they are going off. So if you you miss the window to save your files for some reason, hospital or whatever, they are simply gone. It is now the second storage service I have used that goes off.

Where the fuck do you go where you have no internet connection and you need all of your stored files?

I use One Drive and Amazon CLoud and I have a personal cloud server and I never have any trouble getting my data whenever I wanted to

 

[FA_Q2]

I bought a 32gb USB drive from Walmart on sale this past week for less than $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I should have gotten 2.

That really is pretty average:
32GB, USB Flash Drives, USB Flash Drives & Memory Cards, Components - Newegg.com

8 bucks. 64gig versions are 12. USB drives are dirt cheap now.

 

[Bleipriester]

My front USB virtually exploded!

Yesterday, a neighbor gave me his old Mainboard with a i5 2500K and 16Gb of Ram. He used it some years and got a new computer. I put the MB out of the case and the cooler almost fell of the CPU in the process. I figured out 3 out of 4 mountings were broken. This explains he claimed 70 °C is a normal temperature for the i5 and it was this 70 since he got this computer! I tried it nevertheless since it worked. But it didn´t. The coolers ran but that was all. I head to rebuild my computer and when it was done I was monitoring the temp in the Bios as I lacked of heat conducting paste. Everything was fine after 20 minutes or so. So I plugged my USB drive to the USB to begin setup. Two or three seconds later there was a sharp and loud electric bang from the direction of my computer! But nothing happened. Then the smell came and I switched it off immediately. I could not find anything and I turned it on again and everything was fine except for the missing USB in the quick boot menu.
The front USB and the stick are now "retired".

 

[EverCurious]

Best of both worlds and smaller than a key

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WR3Z3A/?tag=usmb-20

 

[Lewdog]

I bought a 32gb USB drive from Walmart on sale this past week for less than $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I should have gotten 2.

That really is pretty average:
32GB, USB Flash Drives, USB Flash Drives & Memory Cards, Components - Newegg.com

8 bucks. 64gig versions are 12. USB drives are dirt cheap now.

Well even after searching other sites, since I picked it up at the WalMart instead of paying shipping it was still cheap, though not as good a deal as I thought. It's FileMate so it's a good brand, just a 2.0 and not a 3.0, which sucks.

 

[Bleipriester]

I bought a 32gb USB drive from Walmart on sale this past week for less than $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I should have gotten 2.

That really is pretty average:
32GB, USB Flash Drives, USB Flash Drives & Memory Cards, Components - Newegg.com

8 bucks. 64gig versions are 12. USB drives are dirt cheap now.

Well even after searching other sites, since I picked it up at the WalMart instead of paying shipping it was still cheap, though not as good a deal as I thought. It's FileMate so it's a good brand, just a 2.0 and not a 3.0, which sucks.

What matters is the actual speed of your USB stick. Many sticks won´t surpass the 60MB/sec that USB 2.0 supports. The cheap ones not in any case.

 

[FA_Q2]

I bought a 32gb USB drive from Walmart on sale this past week for less than $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I should have gotten 2.

That really is pretty average:
32GB, USB Flash Drives, USB Flash Drives & Memory Cards, Components - Newegg.com

8 bucks. 64gig versions are 12. USB drives are dirt cheap now.

Well even after searching other sites, since I picked it up at the WalMart instead of paying shipping it was still cheap, though not as good a deal as I thought. It's FileMate so it's a good brand, just a 2.0 and not a 3.0, which sucks.

Meh, 3.0 is overstated. The transfer rates are not bottle necked at the connection but rather the devices themselves. 2.0 is still more than sufficient for anything in the PC market. Far more than sufficient.

 

[EverCurious]

3.0 also suffers from interference issues as it's usually not shielded - aka not great for USB audio products I had to put ferrite clips on all my cables to clean up my vocal recordings. (Though to be completely fair I have a lot of other interference from high power components; 1600W PSU, (2) R9-290X GPUs, home theater receiver, custom LEDs, water pumps, etc. Lots of crackles before I beaded everything heh)

 

[Moonglow]

I use floppy disks..