Comment on More and more USB sticks and microSD cards are being made with dubious components — data recovery firm uncovers no-name, low-quality NAND inside many devices

• tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I use them for:

  • Music in my car
  • Moving files to my locked-down work PC
  • The (read only) OS drives for my Unraid NAS servers
  • Media for my parents to watch when they are away on vacation and can plug it into a hotel TV
  • General sneakernetting of large files

  They definitely don’t get as much use as they used to, but I’m still using them.

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  • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also in a business context you need them to play displays on screens at conferences usually.

    And students I imagine will frequently use them to print documents at the library, or design students at the print shop

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    • FelipeFelop@discuss.online ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.

      The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.

      In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.

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      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Depends. on a 3x3 booth setup with just a screen on a pole with no connectivity - you don’t want to run a cable to a laptop because you’re using the table for product demos

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• randombullet@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah I agree. I have a drive running Ventoy and that’s about it.

  Also if I’m moving a lot of data. I’ll use a NVMe enclosure to speed up the transfer instead of network.

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• Rhaedas@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Be sure to have backups and not that sole location. Same is true of any physical drive, but at least a drive failure might be recoverable. A cloud storage can just be gone one day.

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• vanontom@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think of “thumb drives” as portable flash storage + USB. “Portable backup drives” have taken its place for me. Incredibly fast (NVMe + USB-C), quite small (M2 card size + case), durable (same as thumb drives), growing sizes (1-2 TB affordable).

  I keep my old flash drives for smaller things like bootable apps, fresh OS installs, firmware updates. I definitely have no need for mystery off-brand storage though.

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• TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Play music in a car without using Bluetooth. Boot a computer for setup. Bring pictures/videos somewhere to display without having to rely on other people's wifi. Infect computers with malware without realizing.

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