Kingston 4GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive

a year ago? yea, these things have been going down in price fast! i cant wait for the 32gb to be this price.

Shipping kills this Woot. It’s a buck cheaper on the manufacturer’s site

http://shop.kingston.com/partsinfo.asp?ktcpartno=DT100/4GB&bannersource=pricegrabber&promo=prcgrbr

I got a 4GB sandisk from Staples for $8 shipped.

Found some transfer speed info: http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/storage/datatraveler100/

3.8 mb/s for a 1.1gb file

This means that while this could “work” with readyboost, it wouldn’t actually do anything for you; it would wear out the flash drive faster with no benefit.

Yeep. Are Kingston thumbdrives becoming the new Sansas or something?

The volatile world of flash-memory manufacturing jolted some more this month as SanDisk sold off a chunk of its manufacturing to Toshiba and Micron said it would shutter a whole fab.
Toshiba said last week that it would buy 30 percent of the production capacity at its semiconductor venture with SanDisk to increase its own output.

The companies jointly own two factories in Japan and will split the remaining 70 percent of the output equally, Toshiba said in a statement. SanDisk said it stands to reap a total of $1 billion from the deal.

SanDisk reported a 21 percent decline in third quarter revenues vs. the previous year — a net loss of $155 million. In a conference call, company CEO Eli Harari blamed excessive inventory for the financial woes.

Harari also said that he remained open to talks with Samsung about a possible buy-out, provided they came up with the right price.

Micron said earlier in the month that it would discontinue flash-memory manufacturing at its plant, in Boise, Idaho, and slash its global workforce by 15 percent over the next two years.

Micron manufactures NAND flash memory in Boise through a joint venture with Intel.

“The combination of declining customer demand and product oversupply in the marketplace has driven selling prices for NAND flash memory significantly below manufacturing costs,” the company said in a statement announcing the move.

Micron owns Lexar Media. According to a spokesperson, Lexar will not be impacted by the closure of the Boise fab.

Roughly 85 percent of the demand for NAND flash comes from consumers, said Nam Hyung Kim, Director and Chief Analyst, iSuppli. Consumer spending has been lagging, which has hurt demand for NAND products “badly,” Kim said.

$11 shipped each is only cheaper if you only want one. If you want two, woot is better ($19 vs. $22).

Touche

obviously this is only a deal if you get more than 1 with the shipping and all, but am I the only one to notice the fact it says linux 2.6.x+…? WTF does that mean? There are SO many distros, what dos that mean?

That said, 1/3 of the purchases are for just one, so people really are paying more to get shipment by smartpost.

Incorrect, readyboost measure random access speed to determine usefulness. NOT streaming speed. This is why an external USB HD doesn’t do readyboost. It may stream information at 60mb/s but on random access it slows to a complete crawl (which is the theory behind readyboost). You notice this like when you copy a folder with 1000 files of the same size as a folder with only 1 file. Although you really shouldn’t be using ReadyBoost unless you have under 1gb of ram, as thats only the point where you see noticable performance. And you REALLY Shouldn’t run Vista unless you have 2gb of ram. So as such readyboost is almost useless.

was thinking the same thing… heh heh

To sum it all up, if you’ve kept your linux version up to date, you probably have a 2.6 kernel, regardless of the distro number.

There are two sets of numbers here. The linux kernel number is the low level operating system controlling access from the user interface to the hardware. Wikipedia has a long article about linux kernel development, version numbering, etc., if you’re interested.

Each distro packages its own user interface (GUI, browser, default editor, etc.) and may have differing support for specific hardware configurations. The distros change on separate schedules from the kernel and have their own numbering systems. Some vendors appear to maintain their own kernel for stability (see the Wikipedia article), so different distros may have different kernels.

According to Ubuntu, “Ubuntu packages the latest 2.6 kernel for optimal desktop speed and features. However, if you want to use 2.4, you still can.” The current stable Ubuntu release, however, appears to be 8.04 LTS. (There is a newer version, 8.10, but the release notes only describe what gets broken, and it’s not the version you get when you go to the “download Ubuntu” page.)

No, but you may be the only one who cares that doesn’t understand it. While there are many distributions of Linux, there is only one Linux. The current Kernel release is 2.6.27.4

Check your distribution to see which Kernel it has.

I have one of these and it works just fine. My only complaint is that there isn’t a way to connect it to a keychain or lanyard.

no spot for keychain no woot :frowning:

Anyone bought these in the last couple hours?

Trying to buy 3 but stuck on the ‘order status - your order is processing’ page. And I notice nobody purchased in the last hour.

I bought a thumb drive and ever since woot has been haunting me with really cheap thumb drives. Too bad I don’t need one, cause they are a steal for this price.

Just bought one for my wife so she has a way t move files around. Cheaper than you will find in retail stores anyway…

Hm, if I buy one of these, I’ll have a complete collection… 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB. :stuck_out_tongue: