I just read a really stupid article in T3 magazine that stated USB storage is now obsolete.

The author argued that with cloud storage USB drives and other local storage is now obsolete and pointless. I would love to see how they would do a clean OS install on any PC without a USB stick.

And there is no way I would trust cloud storage for important files.

I even still use DVD-Rs sometimes to back some things up just to have a physical offline copy stored and quite a few larger mechanical HDDs.
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Exactly, no way of trusting cloud storage, I don't use any. Still have many USB drives lying around.
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How do you backup if internet is down? How do you give files to a friend without internet?
I bet most of people that dont work with computers dont know how to transfer files between computers without a pen.
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I still only have a couple of USB sticks which I bought years ago. I mostly use SD cards as I have a lot of those lying around for cameras. But it is also feasible to transfer over a network, especially if you have gigabit ethernet.

Also, I bought my first BD drive last year, and stocked up on BD-Rs and DVD-Rs .

Unfortunately there isn't much technology/engineering literacy in a lot of the press. There was an article recently which got picked up by several newspapers about someone who's BT Digital Voice didn't work properly. She suggested that we should keep some skeleton service of the old analogue lines in service (presumably using the existing 30-40 year old equipment that BT are trying to get rid of) "just in case Putin switches off our WiFi".

Yes, BT really should get their act together and fix their customer's VoIP/internet service... but seriously...?

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I had a TV producer come round to see me a year ago as he wanted to buy some video. They only bought 10 seconds in the end, and I gave them the entire files that the 10 seconds were extracted from. They were shot in DV so were only 25Mbps and I just uploaded them to my web server. Easy enough.

But in order for them to make that purchase they wanted to see my original footage (or as much of it as I was willing to give them). He came round to see me (he was visiting the area anyway) and brought an HDD. Didn't take long to copy 2 hours worth of DV, but had it been 4K it could have taken ages. That would have been a nightmare for me to send over the internet. I almost certainly would have had to have made low resolution low bitrate proxies. In fact, unless they could provide me with access to an FTP server, I probably would have had to do the same thing for standard definition DV.

But the old technology enthusiast in me feels smug that I am responsible for 10 seconds worth of Channel 4 being shot on DV tape last year .
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PMSL!

I still have USB Sticks kicking around....

USB 2 ....dead!

USB 3 ....meh!

USB 3.1.... only if I have to...

USB 3.2.... Now you're talking! - Install WinBlowz from this media & after setting your OS install key.... we're talking less than 4 minutes to Desktop. - Based on Z790 14900KS architecture and fast SSD of course!

Your lesser hardware (AMD-ism) probably isn't going to yield the same results.

I've got an insanely fast 256GB USB stick @ over 400Mb/Sec writes that will not setup as an installation media stick whatever I try to do with it. - Grr & then some!
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Set it up via Linux! I often find when writing an ISO to USB stick it's Windows that's the problem. Same media normally fine performed in Linux.

Still considering AMD lesser hardware? Threadripper? Or for gaming the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 24 cores and 3D V Cache. And I stick with AMD GPUs for Linux compatibility, although my gaming PC, although very out of date, is currently still running on i7 and an nvidia GPU so that proves I've not loyal to any brand. I buy the best value for money at the time, and the components that don't have issues, so at the moment that would not be Intel or nVidia.
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Regarding Windows install from USB. I've not had any experience of installing Windows in a few minutes. Not new hardware by any means but I recently had to do a clean install of Windows 11 on my wife's laptop which is a recent i5 (forget the model) and it took over an hour to get tot he Welcome to Windows screen, and then about another 20-30 minutes "setting things up". Regardless of the PC once you get to the "setting things up" screen it always takes a stupidly long time. By contract Linux Mint Cinnamon on a similar spec laptop, but an AMD Ryzen 5, took about 10-15 minutes max to be fully installed and sitting at the desktop waiting for me to use it. I really do hate Windows 11. I still don't mind Windows 10, but I've noticed some new games are forcing Windows 11 now (the new Star Trek Voyager game) and Adobe are starting to not let you install the latest versions of some of their software such as Photoshop and After Affects (that just means I will be cancelling my subscription and using "older" versions.
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