Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?

38 pointsBalgair97 comments

Curious to know what the HN community thinks these things are called, since there seem to be so many names. I've tried to get most of the common ones, but if I've missed one, please comment your name for it.

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Usually I go with "USB drive", but it's not one of the options so I upvoted "USB flash drive".

"Sneakernet" is a related term I sadly only heard in an era when most PC's are networked. "How are you transferring the files?" "Sneakernet." (Walking floppies or a USB drive across a room.)

I also only say "flash drive", but I'm opting to not vote because I've heard the full "USB flash drive" on rare occasion and they're as different as other options in the list.

Not listed: Flash drive. So I picked "USB flash drive".

Which is strange because I have always called it a flash drive and have never heard it referred to as a USB flash drive

In my country it's colloquially called just "stick" (the english word), sometimes "USB stick". "Copy that stuff on the stick."

I suppose in english "a stick" refers to any long thin piece of a tree or shrub, so it's ambiguous.

I'm going to abuse the term “Floppy Stick” from today and use the hell out of it.

flash diskette

When I still worked in government contracting in a physical office many of my coworkers referred to them as "zip drives". As a former avid user of Zip drives and disks it made me wince.

Zip is probably the best name we’re going to get in terms of concise meaning. Might as well reuse it, not like it will clash in the future.

Some of these are very popular regionally. For example "Pen Drive" is almost universal in some parts of India, to the point that I've heard people say "PD"

Growing up in mainland China, everybody used "USB" and sometimes "U盘" which meant "U-drive" more or less

Thumb drive or flash drive for me, mostly.

My aunt, who was an Army Colonel, gave me the first one I ever had, which had a whopping 128 megabytes of storage capacity. This would have probably been in 2003ish.

She called it a "geek stick", which is a term I've never heard anyone else use.

I am sincerely hoping that she didnt give it to you by leaving it on a park bench in a Washington DC suburb...

Trying to get away from "USB stick", I also use "USB Drive", so without the "Flash".

Due to the ever increasing amount of Cybersecurity news, about 5 or so years ago my workmates started called it "the security hazard" - for example, "Hey Dave, can you pass me the security hazard? I need to transfer some big files to the Waterloo Exchange server and don't want to hit the network."

I fully support this term being mandatory in all companies.

Former colleague of mine, a technology reporter at Computerworld, got a letter from a company about 15 years ago demanding that he not use the term "thumb drive" in his articles unless it was referring to their product. It was a generic term by then, although they may have been trying to trademark it. He basically said "F that" and we continued to use "thumb drive."

In the late 90s and early 00s we sometimes got requests from PR companies working for big tech demanding that we use certain spelling for product names. Two examples that spring to mind are "Yahoo!" and "Windows Me" ... in the later case, we had been using "Windows Millennium Edition" or "Windows ME" and the PR people did not like that.

These are really obnoxious examples as they violate the rules of the language that exist for a reason. If you use an exclamation mark, you want to attract the attention of the reader to something for a reason. Similarly, there are rules for creating initialisms and acronyms and random capitalization changes are not part of them.

We call them "clé USB" (USB key) in french: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9_USB

Flash drive or thumb drive. Use them pretty much interchangeably.

USB key

Flash drive

Yeah, memory stick or usb stick.

And likewise, in Norwegian I mainly call it minnepinne just like I mainly call it memory stick in English. Although, in Norwegian I might also say usbnøkkel even though I wouldn’t say USB key in English.

I'm dying to know how "usbnøkkel" is pronounced.

u s b knuck el (kinda like nickel, but specifically pronouncing the e before the l, and obviously the ø is a different sound than the i).

-knuckle is much closer, isn’t it?

Note that “Memory Stick” is a trademark of Sony corporation for their proprietary non-USB portable flash RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick

Flash Drive

(not "USB Flash Drive")

"Flash drive" or alternatively "thumb drive" around less technical folks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

Also missing is the misnomer “USB hard drive”.

By the way, I think it's quite funny that the "save file" icon in many applications is still a floppy disk.

...and our modern phones don't look like the "Phone" or "Dialer" app icons on my phone. Icons are idioms.

While it's archaic now, I actually can't think of a better icon that fits all modern meanings. At least it has historical use on its side, even if it's never accurate anymore.

I heard once that some young children thought it was actually a picture of a refrigerator (which makes a sort of sense as a real world analog for saving something for later) so maybe this issue has magically solved itself.

> While it's archaic now, I actually can't think of a better icon that fits all modern meanings.

I think the modern approach is to hide the entire concept altogether. At least in most SaaS services. Just save continuously.

I'd be ok with anything that doesn't include "USB". The interface has nothing to do with the concept.

I find pretty funny how I use "pendrive" or simply "pen" (without translating it) in my mother tongue, like the rest of the people of the part of Spain where I live, and how I use "USB stick" in English due to how many times I read it like that in the Internet.

Flash drive is the one typically. Lot easier to say than yoo-ess-bee…

But just realized they aren’t drives any longer, but solid-state storage. Reminds me of my dad who called any music storage “tapes”, even CDs.

Could be “removable storage” but a little clunky. What is a better word for removable? Portable?

I WANT to say "Thumb drive", but I always get ahead of myself and start with "USB" and then either my brain catches up and I say "USB drive" or I lose it and end up "USB thing" or "USB stick".

> the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files

I'm gonna go with USB Ethernet Dongle

I didn't realize this was (still?) controversial. You can literally search on Amazon (and other sites) and see they're listed primarily as "Flash Drives". I thought that was long settled!

Yeah but I swear they were listed primiarily as “usb sticks” years ago.

Poll results, sorted with percentages:

https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=32193431

Every item count is 1 less than the poll shows.

Yes, every item gets a vote of 1 automatically, even if no one votes for it.

Flash disc is my personal anachronism. Although if anyone out there is calling these things a floppy anything I see I've been outdone. I applaud you.

Originally, "disc" was just the optical variation of "disk"

“USB Drive”

It's always either "Flash Drive" or "Pen Drive".

Everything other feels too generic, wrong, or inaccurate. To me personally, I mean.

In Brazil, most popular denomination is pendrive. Probably because the first of such a device that became popular here was also a pen.

Zip disquette is the most fulfilling term

"gum stick" per my wife (I'm a "thumb drive" guy, myself)

Everyone I know calls this a 'Dongle' - how is this not in the list

If someone said "dongle" to me today I would assume they mean an adapter of some kind; I've heard it used for the lightning -> audio adapter you need to plug headphones into an iPhone. If I google for "dongle" I see some small USB docks and a few USB=>bluetooth adapters.

I first head "dongle" used to describe the small copy-protection device you needed to plug in to use certain expensive softwares. The software would not launch if it could not detect the dongle.

Because "dongle" has a very specific, different meaning. A dongle allows connection between two devices that have mismatched connectors. If someone asked me for a dongle, I'd reply, "From what to what?"

in my world dongle is either the copy protection USB stick, or specifically the lightning-to-3.5mm headphone adapter, depending on the context...

But I guess since USB-C apple era any usb-c adapter does the dongling.

FYI some slavs call it 'flashka' with an a as in 'flash'.

USB key

USB drive, or if someone questions me, I might say thumb drive.

"USB stick".

added, thank you

Almost everyone in Spain calls it "Pendrive"

I call it a thumb drive, but I named it BARRY_ALLEN.

In my place, it's called "USB Card".

"usb key"

Forbidden stick. They are illegal in my company.

Usually DOK (saying it like short for doctor)

In Brazil it's mostly Pen Drive.

The biggest question that I have with people that I talked about is if the noun is masculine or feminine ("O pendrive" or "A pendrive"?)

Definitely "O pendrive" in my experience. Never heard the other one.

Disk on Key!

"USB"

Hey just put the files on the usb

added, thank you

A f'ing security risk :-)

USB flash drive or thumb drive

Flash drive

You mean a USB wifi dongle?

Do they still exist?

Attack Vector

Thingimajig

flash drive

[x] Goober

USB pen.

Goober

USB key.

USB Key

USB drive

i call it clutter

dongle

Same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle

Phone.

"USB mass storage device" is the official technical name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class

That also encompasses non-small usb devices that you plug in to transfer files.

Nice try, but I'm going to out-hairsplit you. "USB mass storage device" is the generic name for a larger class of storage devices, which include 2.5/3.5 inch SATA adapters and can even be implemented by a raspberry pi to do cool dynamic stuff [1]. The OP asked for a subset of USB MSDs that is a "small USB device you plug in."

[1] https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/pi-zero-w-smart-usb-f...

Your phone is also a "USB mass storage device" when you plug it into your computer.

Usually it presents as an MTP device (and possibly also other types of device) these days. Phones haven't been USB mass storage devices for years, data corruption due to improper unmounting caused too many issues.

I never had that problem and want to go back.

Right, thanks for the correction.

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