How many USB flash drives do you have lying around?

[Ericloewe]

Bear with this rather silly question for a bit:

XenForo kindly reminds me that I've been registered on this forum for a little less than 14 months, with probably a few more weeks of pure lurking.

I've seen a lot of weird things, from the all-too common "FreeNAS won't boot on my 486SX, will adding an FPU help?" questions to the more esoteric "I did $_Weird_thing_nobody_would_ever_come_up_with and now FreeNAS only works on Tuesdays and the first Friday of every month." kind of question.

However, there is one type of comment that really utterly confuses me:

"I don't have a second USB drive, only the one FreeNAS is going to boot from."

I honestly cannot imagine not having at least one moderately-sized USB drive lying around, for whatever application is needed in the future.

Just in one drawer, I have:

• 4 moderately-sized drives (8/16GB)
• 5 small ones (1, 2 and 4GB)
• 3 (1*4GB and 2*8GB) drives that can be freed if it comes to that
• 7 drives with various Live CDs, OS ISOs and factory restore images

Plus the ones I carry around (4 or 5 of them).

Am I the exception, or is it really weird that so many people show up and say "I don't have a spare USB drive"?

 

[dlavigne]

I have at least 4 on my desk and 2 in my laptop bag. And that's not counting the other ones scattered about which I could find if I had to go looking...

 

[gpsguy]

I chose the 11-20 answer. I've got 4 lined up in a row, just above the function keys on my keyboard. Another 3 visible - less than a 4 feet from my desk.

Most are on the smallish side. I still have my original pair of 8GB Patriot drives I bought for FreeNAS 8.0.x My 16GB flash drive (Microcenter brand) probably cost me ~$75 USD back in the day. I bought a 32GB Sandisk USB 3.0 flash drive (locally, on sale) last week for ~$15. If I start digging around, I can probably find the rest.

I still use CD/DVD's. It's safer than poking your flash drive into a potentially virus infected device.

 

[jgreco]

I expect hundreds, though mostly just crap laying around. Going back at least 15 years, since I recall having gotten one of the first generation ones years ago at SANE, a whopping big 16MB or something like that, that needed a driver tweak to work with FreeBSD.

 

[Jailer]

I chose the 1 to 2 as your question was how many "lying around". I have several that I use for various things including one I carry every day but only a couple that are lying around and free to use.

Now you got me thinking I need a couple more as most of mine are pretty long in tooth and could stand to be replaced.

 

[anodos]

At home, anywhere between 0-5, with an 80% probability of 3. The exact number appears to be in a state of superposition.

At work, all bets are off. I have three of them that are permanently affixed to things. All other ones tend to go through regular (procurement and disappearance cycles). Sometimes I get annoyed and contemplate leaving malware-infected devices sitting on my desk as presents for the people who take them.

CF cards are more stable. I have 2 * 64MB ones, 1 * 4GB, 2* 8GB. So technically, I have enough CF cards to try to create a RAIDZ pool out of them. Now I need to get a bunch of sketchy USB to CF adapters, run them through some daisy-chained hubs, and write a post complaining about how FreeNAS is crap because the performance is terrible. :D