by Joe Waters

The Floppy Drive Replacement

There are so many USB flash drives on the market that it is clear they have become a popular replacement for the floppy disk. You will see USB flash drives referred to as pen drives, jump drives, thumb drives, key drives, or memory sticks. Whatever you call it, a flash drive will be a very welcome addition to your computing environment. Just stick it into the USB port on your computer (or your PSR) and, within a few seconds, a new drive appears on your desktop. On the PSR, the flash drive would appear as USB1. That's it. You don't have to take your computer apart to put in a new drive. You don't even have to install software to read the drive unless you have an older operation system, like Windows 98.

These drives have a many desirable features: no need for batteries, solid state storage, good transfer speeds, durability, portability, and an expected data retention of ten years. With all of these features, these tiny drives can replace much of the functionality of the floppy disk, the Zip disk, and even the CD R/RW drive.

Which Flash Drive?

There are many flash drives available on the market. Some of the drives available are shown here. Click on any of the pictures shown below to go to the manufacturer's site and learn more about the drive. Flash drives are available in a variety of capacities: 64 MB ($25-$35), 128 MB ($35-$55), 256 MB ($60-$80), 512 MB ($120-$160). You can even purchase flash drives 1 GB or greater but these would certainly be overkill for a PSR. The prices shown do not reflect any major market search but rather are meant to give you an idea of what these drives might cost. The costs vary by manufacturer, by capacity, and by merchant selling the drive so it will pay to shop around and keep an eye out for sales.

For use in a PSR-3000, any one of these devices may provide acceptable performance. However, if you are a demanding PC user who wants a high performance flash drive, you can find a review of the performance for each of the models shown here in the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed Flash Drive Review article available at the arstechnica web site. I happened to find the 512 MB version of the PNY available on sale for about $100 and I purchased it. It has been working flawlessly. In the PSR, I can load files from the PNY, as well as from the SmartMedia card, as fast as internal preset styles load. Yet the "speed" of this device was the lowest of those tested below. For use in the PSR, the speed is as fast as it needs to be. Your choice may very well be guided more by what is available locally or what happens to be on sale when you want to buy a flash drive.

USB Floppy Drive

Some PSR owners, who do not fancy themselves as computer gurus, have nonetheless learned enough about their PCs so that they can access the Internet, exchange e-mail, download and unzip files, and copy them to a floppy disk. Once on the disk, they can take the files over for use in their PSR. The PSR may be fun, but all this other computer stuff just a nuisance. You may have, after much, struggling around, finally become comfortable with floppy disks and now they're replaced in the 3000! Well, you do not have to jump with both feet into new technology. You can simply purchase a USB floppy drive. These run about $50, but you can plug one into that USB To Device port on the back of your PSR-3000 and there is your floppy drive, available whenever you want it. You can use it as well as put a SmartMedia card into the SmartMedia slot. The floppy can be used to move data back and forth to your PC and the SmartMedia card, which doesn't have to even be removed from the card slot once you put there, can provide your mass storage option on the PSR. And, with this technique, you wouldn't even have to worry about purchasing a USB SmartMedia card reader/writer. This might also be a suitable option if your PC does not have a USB port or it has one, but you don't want to move the device that's already using it. If you want to transfer a LOT of data from the PC to the SmartMedia card in the PSR, it will take a lot longer with floppy disks, but this may only be a one-time task. Moving just an occasional file back and forth can easily be handled with floppy disks as most users know from the experience with earlier PSR models.

Which Solution?

Everyone can make up their own minds based on their particular needs and what they may already have. I believe using the SmartMedia card as the device to carry data back and forth from the PC to the PSR is not a good solution. The card is small and delicate and, I would think, more easily subject to damage. If the card is damaged, there goes all your data on that card. By contract, the flash drives have been designed to regularly carry data from one computer to the next. For example, a flash drive owner can keep key files on his flash drive and simply carry the drive with him or her when traveling to and from work. Thus, the user could work on work-related files at work or at home. Some of these drives even come with a neck strap with a quick release connection for the drive to facilitate carrying the drive around with you. Some are built into a "pen" that you can just keep in your shirt pocket and take out whenever you want "your" data on a PC. All of this suggests that using this kind of drive to move data between your PSR and your PC will not produce undue wear and tear on the device. In addition, since these are "USB" devices, you don't have to worry about powering a system down before you plug something in. Just plug it in and PSR recognizes that is there as does the PC. Unplug it and the PSR immediately recognizes that it is no longer available. (On a PC, you may have to give a command to "eject" the drive before you unplug it to make sure that any files that need to be written to it are written before the drive disappears.)

I purchased a SmartMedia card with a 128 MB capacity and a PNY drive with a 512 MB I will simply keep the SmartMedia card in the PSR. But, in spite of all this solid-state reliability, it probably is a good idea to have a backup. Well, the entire 128 MB on the Card can easily fit in the 512 MB available on the flash drive. And, with the typical hard drive capacities available in computers today, all of those 512 MB can easily be backed up on the PC.

What about capacity? Isn't 512 MB overkill? Well, maybe -- but if the price is right...... Let's take a look at what storage needs might be. If you wanted to store all the original Tyros styles on your flash drive, that would require about 14 MB If you wanted to store all of the styles available on the psrtutorial CD-ROM, excluding the Tyros to 2K variants, that would require about 134 MB and would include over 4,000 styles. You many not want all of those style available, but if you wanted, say 1,000 styles that you liked and used, they would easily fit on a 128 MB card or flash drive. Do you like to save and play midi files? There are over 2,100 midi files from the PSR Performers on the psrtutorial CD-ROM. These take up a little more than 100 MB of space. With a 256 MB flash drive, you could have a couple thousand songs and a couple thousand styles.

Whichever option you choose, you will be delighted with just how fast you can call up anything stored in your Card or in your USB device. Having space available will no longer be your biggest concern. A bigger concern will be how you figure out how to organize all that information so that you can find it when you want it. But, I can't write that lesson until I figure it out myself!