Anyone have any comments/thoughts about this new flash drive? Would it be ideal for DNS?

 USB 3.0 Express RC8

Thanks.

MDH

MDH,

because of the new USB 3.0 specs, my guess would be that this particular USB flash drive might be very viable for DNS. However, there are a couple of caveats that you should be aware of:

1. Your system must support USB 3.0. Otherwise, you will get no better than USB 2.0 performance, if it works at all under USB 2.0.

2. If you have to go with a separate USB 3.0 add-on card, don't expect good performance or even reliability.

3. In the past, DNS has had problems with large USB flash drives functioning properly. For example, DNS would work well with 16 GB flash drives, but would not work very well with 32 GB flash drive or better. Therefore, I would not recommend getting a USB 3.0 Express RC8 flash drive larger than 25 GB.

4. All things considered, while it might be viable under the right conditions and the right system configuration, it's an awfully expensive solution just for a little additional speed.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: Simply powerful, powerfully simple

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." -- Robert X. Cringely

Chuck,

Thanks for your input. I know that it is backward compatible with USB 2.0

MDH

MDH,

Hardware developers seldom create any new hardware that isn't at least backward compatible a reasonable extent. The same applied to USB 2.0 vs. USB 1.1. However, if you're using this particular flash drive on a system that only support USB 2.0, it won't be any faster than any standard USB 2.0 flash drive. The 2.0 USB standard can only a function at a certain speed. Using the USB 3.0 Express RC8 won't be any faster than using a standard USB 2.0 flash drive. This is simply because it's not the speed of the flash drive, it's the speed of the USB protocol supported the drivers and motherboards that determines how fast I/O will be. I may be preaching to the choir on this, but I thought I would point out just for the benefit those who don't understand it just to be sure that we're clear these points.

That being said, would there be any advantage in purchasing this flash drive if you're only running USB 2.0? No. Would I purchase one of these even under this condition? Probably, though I'll wait for the price to come down. I will be building a system in the fall with the Core™ i7 Sandy Bridge Extreme (eight core) processor that will be fully SATA III (6 GB/s) with USB 3.0, and including a 256 GB Corsair SATA III 6 GB/s SSD drive and 4 SATA III WD 6 GB/s 2 TB hard drives. So, I can wait until then. However, I've already built one of these systems with the Core™ i7 2600K with the aforementioned SSD drive and WD SATA III drives and there is no necessity of using an external USB flash drive because during the burning phrase and when I was testing such before delivering it to my client, that system booted completely into Windows and loaded DNS with the current user profile on the SSD drive in under 16 seconds. Why do I need a USB flash drive because that SSD drive is several times faster than even the fastest USB 3.0 flash drives.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: Simply powerful, powerfully simple

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." -- Robert X. Cringely

stonerose

Danny,

Our hospital has gone to an EMR (electronic medical record), and different aspects will be phased in over time, and will eventually include daily physician patient visit documentation. Currently docs hand-write daily notes in a paper chart, while consult notes, admitting history and physicals, and discharge summaries are dictated via phone to a transcriptionist. When the paper goes away and dictating to a transcriptionist is no longer an option, they will have to either type or use speech recognition--great pain for some. As far as the speech recognition option, it would work well if they could use the "poor-man's" roaming profile that Lunis refers to, where they can go from computer to computer (on different floors) carrying a flash drive with their user profile on it. This would get around some of the inherent problems of trying to have all of their profiles either on every single computer or accessed via network. So, it would be nice to have a thumb drive that is particularly up to this task.

MDH