Flash Drives

Do you have a USB drive, or Flash memory cards? It’s a cool idea. I’ve got a 4GB U3 drive; a 2GB regular USB drive; and three or four 1GB SD cards, which I use in the car audio, as it has a slot for them. The micro SD are even cooler I guess – such a tiny card, and can contain 8-10 hours of music.

They’re convenient. I use them in preference to carting around a laptop. Armed with a U3 drive that contains useful stuff like Skype (along with a pair of collapsible USB headphones, so I can make worldwide calls from anywhere that has a windows computer); OpenOffice, mIRC , Filezilla, and Firefox. I’ve got most of what I need. If I’ve left something at home, I can always use LogMeIn to get it.

Now there’s a down side to all this.

That flash drive, won’t last for ever. Flash memory “wears out”.

Once you’ve written or “flashed” something to the memory, power can be completely removed and the memory will retain whatever was written to it.

The downside is that memory can be flashed only so many times. perhaps as few as 10,000 times or as much as 100,000 times.

Eventually though, it WILL quit working. Some of the bits will die, and you only need one dead bit, and you could potentially lose all your data. Many chips carry error-correcting circuitry, a bit like a hard drive, but eventually the bad bits will get so that the drive fails anyway.

Using a thumb drive for music isn’t a bad use. You’ll probably only refill a 1GB drive once a day, and even at 10,000 uses, that’s 30 years of use. Of course in 30 years, at the present rate of technological progress, it’ll long have been consigned to a museum, or the trash.

Don’t use them for mission-critical stuff, or write-heavy stuff like databases, which can make hundreds of writes in a single short session. That 10,000 worst-case scenario doesn’t seem so much then, and will be used up in a lot less than 30 years!

Like any data that you attach any kind of importance to, make a backup. Do it now. Tomorrow may be too late. You can also mislay or lose these small cards and sticks too. Don’t keep your only copy of the last ten albums you bought online on a stick. Have a back up on your hard drive or CD, or even better, your hard drive AND a CD.

Empty the photos off your camera sooner rather than later. If you lose the camera, or the card dies, you might never be able to replace those pictures. Again keep a back up. A friend recently took a once in her lifetime trip to Japan. She came home (she lives in New Zealand), and dutifully copied the photos from the camera. However, a couple of weeks ago she got the laptop stolen in a break-in. No, she didn’t have a backup.

Don’t let that happen to you. Backup. Everything. All Media. Not just flash Drives.

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