Thumb drive drive

December 13, 2006 9:43 AM

Inveneo is a non-profit bringing technology to the developing world. They've got several projects going in Africa to connect, train, and equip villages but their latest push is an interesting one: The Thumb Drive Drive. In the era of $50 2Gb USB drives, many of us probably have discarded 16-128Mb drives sitting around. Send them to Inveneo and they'll get used in places where broadband isn't an option and quick storage is necessary.
posted by mathowie (10 comments total)

Make sure everything's really deleted before you send it out.
posted by spiderskull at 10:28 AM on December 13, 2006

Much as I like the idea of donating eyewear frames overseas, I'd rather donate a new (or nearly new) flash drive than an older module with a few indeterminate read/write cycles remaining.
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:55 AM on December 13, 2006

Smart Dalek -- it's not the read cycles, it's the write cycles that are of concern. A lot of flash memory made in the last 2 years can handle up to about a million write cycles (and much more in some cases), so I doubt most people have come close to that limit.
posted by spiderskull at 11:03 AM on December 13, 2006

Thanks, Matt. I posted a link to the project on my org's info page.
posted by figment of my conation at 11:25 AM on December 13, 2006

You know, if it wasn't for Matt linking this, I wouldn't give it but a cursory glance.

Such is my bitter disillusion with many "chair charitable" initiatives, which are all the charities that make you feel good with a very little, almost untraceable effort. I personally deeply loathe some people behind them.

So if you are slightly less bitter than me you may consider donating the thumb drive, primarily because it is not any unknown person hack that is linking to the site , but it's worth repeating Matt is the guy that runs the whole Metafilter show for us ; that doesn't mean he has perfect insight in the charity, but he isn't one who would deliberately link a scam.

Yet I wouldn't sleep THAT well this night if I didn't ask you to also donate even just $1 to somebody you know is in need, a person, not a charity. A flesh and blood person.
posted by elpapacito at 11:39 AM on December 13, 2006

A lot of flash memory made in the last 2 years can handle up to about a million write cycles (and much more in some cases), so I doubt most people have come close to that limit.

Actually if you load an OS onto one and boot from it, the background processes can quickly reach a million write cycles and trash a thumb drive.
posted by ernie at 11:49 AM on December 13, 2006

ernie: correct, even if I guess 0,001% (just makin numbers) of thumbdriver user ever used it as bootdisk
posted by elpapacito at 12:02 PM on December 13, 2006

HA! Your reasonable estimation is no match for my pedantry!
posted by ernie at 12:07 PM on December 13, 2006

I almost bought this stack of DVD-Rs from Staples a week ago, but didn't want or need the free flash drive. Now I might think about it. I bet there are tons of unused flash drives from this offer alone out there.
posted by bink at 1:53 PM on December 13, 2006

ernie -- yeah, the assumption was that it was used for basic tasks -- storing documents, some mp3s, things of that nature.
posted by spiderskull at 12:29 AM on December 14, 2006