"Stubby" wrote in message
. ..
What is the bit transfer rate to the flash drive? Most flash memory is
fairly slow and not suitable to execute programs.

Flash drives can be faster than your usual flash RAM, but they are still
slow, yes (and some of the ones being advertised on that page are slower
than a regular thumb drive). Does that make them "not suitable to execute
programs"? Hardly. Plenty of people run programs right off their thumb
drives, on the 480Mb/s USB interface (or 12Mb/s if they are stuck with USB
1.0).

Has anyone actually had "altitude problems" with standard disks? In 10
years of being a road warrior, I never did.

Define "road warrior". Conventional vented hard drives should be fine up to
10,000', which is above the altitudes one would typically see on a
commercial flight. Were you using your hard drive in an unpressurized
airplane above 10,000'?

Is immediate failure of a hard drive used above 10,000' guaranteed? No, not
at all. But it does shorten the lifetime of the drive. If done often
enough, at high enough altitudes, the failure of the drive is likely to
occur quite quickly.

My understanding is that modern disks have the heads riding in contact
with the surface.

Your understanding is incorrect.

That said, the original post reads every bit like spam, and I wouldn't be
surprised to find some connection between the poster and the web site. And
those prices? You'd have to REALLY want to use your computer above 10,000'
to shell out the bucks they want. You'd get better performance and save
money just by making sure your drive is backed up (for convenience), storing
your user data on a thumb drive (to make doubly ensure you don't lose
important data), and just replacing your drive every time it fails due to
high-altitude operation.

You can buy a lot of conventional hard drives for the couple grand they want
for anything that matches the performance of a USB 2.0 thumb drive. Even
their least-expensive drive is still $600, and it's a paltry 16GB with a
downright anemic transfer rate of 8.5MB/s. Ick. Why bother? For that
price, you can buy a dozen low-end 40GB conventional hard drives that vastly
outperform the flash drive. With the standard three-year warranty, you
might even get your replacements free (technically, high-altitude operation
ought to invalidate the warranty, but I doubt the drive manufacturer would
bother to look beyond whether there's any obvious signs of abuse).

Pete