A Flash Drive can solve a world of problems

My husband buys me new flash drives from time to time when he shops for his own office supplies. I use one for every day use and I have a separate larger one that I back everything up on. I rarely, if ever, store anything on my hard drive anymore. I never knew flash drives were expensive, though.

The curse of being in IT is that you know too much about how things work.

A flash drive can read data all day long, but every time it writes data, the solid state components degrade slightly. Eventually, there is a single bit on a single chip that can't be read, and the entire drive immediately turns into a worthless chunk of plastic and silicon.

This scares the crap out of people who want 100% reliability.

The reality is that you can change the value of that bit several thousand times before it can't be read anymore, and the drive can tell when the bit is getting close to that point. Once it gets close enough, the drive silently and transparently takes the block of data where that bit is located, and copies it to an empty area that isn't about to fail.

The drive has a buffer space of about 10% to 20% of the drive's capacity which your computer doesn't even know is there. It's there specifically and exclusively for the drive to prevent these failures, by moving data in the near-failure areas to this space. When this space starts to be exhausted, modern name-brand USB drives reduce the capacity of the drive automatically to make more room for failure recovery.

The algorithms used to do this are extremely effective, so while using a USB drive as your main hard disk is going to blow through the device and trash it in a year or two... using it the same way we used to use floppies, tapes, and recordable CD/DVD media is going to work rather longer than your magnetic hard drive does.

In other words, if you're using a USB drive to backup your main hard drive, just replace it whenever you replace your main hard drive and you're extremely unlikely to have any problems.

But from an engineering perspective, yes, when a USB drive fails - it FAILS. Completely and catastrophically and without warning. You plug it in one day and it works, then the next day you plug it in and nothing happens. You get the dreaded "unrecognised USB device connected" message, and as far as your computer is concerned, you just plugged in a cable with nothing on the other end.

It's just that this will probably never happen to you. Those of us who have been using computers a long time remember what's called a "head crash" on hard drives - where the physical machinery of the hard disk physically carves trenches into the physical platters, and your data is completely gone suddenly and without warning. You're just sitting there at your computer one day, and it starts making a noise like gravel in a blender, and then all your data is gone. This has not happened to me or anyone else I know for about twenty years, but many of us are still afraid it might happen.

That doesn't mean it ever will. Hard drives fail so rarely and are upgraded so frequently these days, you're probably going to get a new one somewhere between 10% and 20% of the drive's lifespan. On the average, you might experience a head crash on a modern hard drive every half a century.

I have half a dozen flash drives, but rarely use them. I started to use one for a Linux primary drive. It was slow, and worked for a month. However, I learned from the Linux forums that the flash drive would eventually give out with that much use. None has actually died on me, but my daughter had one die on her that she used daily. It was an old 128MB drive that had lasted for years.

No one knows how long they actually last, but like anything else, they fail. I chose the HDD because at the time I bought it, it was considerably more storage for considerably less cost. I paid about $70 for an almost credit card sized 360 GB drive. At that time, a 32GB Flash drive sold for about $50. It runs faster too.

Buck

I use two separate flash drives for my most important data. One is my backup and the other is my backup's backup. hehe

The chances are very low that both flash drives would fail at once and they're cheap enough to make it cost effective.

Paulie888,
I was referring to: "I can even password protect the drive in case I am in a public place." Thanks,
Meharis

I get some extended functionality with TrueCrypt, but with a twist.

I have created a TrueCrypt 'drive' on my hard disk. I mount it as drive J: (See first letter of my first name.) This large, encrypted, file that is mounted as drive J: holds the core of my biz, personal life, etc.

This drive J: is copied (unmounted) to a Flash drive that's on my key chain for backup. I've even washed it by accident. No problems.

The ideas being:

If someone steals my computer, they can't see my 'stuff'.

If my computer crashes or is stolen, I'm not out of business.

Hope this helps.


Joe Mobley