Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[dsimic]

Right, and I think adding the security element that @Julius_GU suggested with the fingerprint reader would make this a killer device with no real competition out there, even at lower speeds. The open source community are often quite privacy focused and at the right price point, I'm sure tonnes of people would love such a product.

Absolutely, we could implement numerous features.  Not necessarily in the first open-hardware device, but the key would be adding new features over time.

Perhaps it is worth pinging somebody like @Luke ?

I've tried reaching TL Lim and Luke multiple times, using pings in forum posts, private messages on the forum, and email messages.  Other forum members tried pinging them as well.  No response at all, which is very strange to me.

Yeah, I would be happy to build out a prototype - but there is absolutely no way I am in a position to take something into production. This would for sure need support from somebody like Pine64. I think I have laid out a relatively viable path in the above to at least start exploring such a device.

Even making a dozen of prototypes wouldn't be exactly trivial.  Sourcing various components in very small quantities is much more difficult and expensive than it may seem at first glance.  Adding flash chips into the BOM would only make things more difficult.

Edit: Please, note that I might be able to produce a very small batch of post-prototype devices, but not before the awful COVID-19 pandemic is over, which will hopefully be sooner than later.  Clearly, the emphasis is on "might".

Edit #2: The OpenSSD project looks very interesting and seems to provide useful resources.  Also, their presentation looks rather promising.  Though, the provided source code looks weird and rather useless.  Of course, it could very well be that I'm missing something.

Edit #3: The "pagemap.c" file from the OpenSSD codebase actually looks interesting, but it seemingly contains no "magic".