jump drives

[letsgorangers]

i went to buy a 2G jump drive yesterday; the brand was memorex. in small print on the bottom of the package, it said that on macs, only usb 1.1 was supported.

on the apple storefront, i read some bad reviews of the sandisk cruzer drives. some say they reformat when you use them with macs and pcs.

anyway, what brand of jump drives do you guys use?


ps-this is my first mac.

 

[Eidorian]

If the drive is USB 2.0 and your Mac has USB 2.0 it'll run at USB 2.0 speeds. I have a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB. I got it for $49 back in March.

 

[thewhitehart]

I use a San-Disk 128 MB drive and it works just fine between PCs and my macs. No unwanted reformatting or anything like that. The only thing is the free encryption program that comes with it is an .exe program and only works on Windows.

Just to tell you, I also use my 512 MB iPod shuffle once in a while as a flash drive. You can allocate drive space limits for it in the iTunes preferences.

Since I'm always using computers that are connected to the internet, I find it far easier to use box.net, which gives you a free 1 GB WebDAV drive online. You can mount it as a network server in OSX by going to Finder, hitting Command + K, and entering "https://www.box.net/dav". It'll ask you for your email address and password that you used to sign up.

There's also Jungle Disk from Amazon, and of course iDisk which I just started the free trial, and I'm enjoying it.

Sorry for the extra info, but I thought it was worth sharing, as a GB free is a GB free...

 

[mrichmon]

on the apple storefront, i read some bad reviews of the sandisk cruzer drives. some say they reformat when you use them with macs and pcs.

This sounds like the reviewers have been confused about which file system works with which computers. Most (possibly all) Jump drives ship formatted with FAT16 or FAT32 (also known as MS DOS format). OS X and Windows will both happily read files from and write files to FAT16 and FAT32 file systems.

If you ever reformat your Jump drive yourself make sure you format it using FAT32 if you want to be able to use the drive on PCs and Macs.

If you only want to use it on Macs then you should format the drive using HFS+ but this would require a reformat of the drive back to FAT 32 to use it with a PC. Similarly, if you want to use the Jump drive only with Windows, you could format the drive using NTFS, but this would require a reformat if you ever want to write files to the drive using OS X.