Usb Memory Sticks (Ufd)

[threegee]

I'm currently buying a little USB 3.0 Flash Drive to run another operating system from on my lappy, and for this the read/write speeds matter a whole lot more than gigabytes per buck.  Suppliers are VERY poor at supplying this essential information, and you can waste a fortune buying them to test them yourself.

 

But, here's a site that supplies objective comparisons so's you can make the best decision.  Certainly one to bookmark on your smartphone or tab to spot bargains while you are out shopping.

 

http://usb.userbenchmark.com/

 

What's particularly useful is the effective speed assessment - raw read and write speeds are not the full story!  (S)He has also computed a value for money figure, and you can sort your list on any of the criteria by clicking on the column title.

 

Remember that unless your computer has USB 3.0 sockets you aren't likely to see anything like the quoted performance on the faster products.  USB 3.0 sockets generally have a tab in them that's colour-coded purple against the usually black USB 2 type.

[Steve]

I'm getting good at reviving old topics

 

Careful what you store on USB sticks - We regularly have customers who rely on them for backup/storage of schoolwork etc - The drive goes bad and files are often corrupt. We recover data from real harddrives with a 95% success rate, but from USB you're talking 40-50%. Don't rely on them!

 

Same can be said of SSD (Solid State Drives) - While nice and fast - I'm using one now, we've seen a *very* high failure rate.

 

threegee: I'm assuming your 'other' OS is linux - multiple writes to these drives sugnificantly impact their lifetime, be sure to disable any swap partition (or file in some cases). You can do this in /etc/fstab. there are some other pointers on mounted partitions like -noatime that you could also look into. (and beware of log files that have regular writes).

 

Anyone using USB sticks for backup - honestly, get an external HDD, but don't even rely on that 100% - Don't want you losing all those family photos!

[threegee]

Thanks for those useful info snippets Steve.  As it happens I'm just testing a cheapo 32GB for integrity right now.

 

I've been at this game since 4 bit processors were truly amazing, and suffered enough data loss to be almost paranoid.  Currently I've got two NAS both with RAID drives, as well as numerous portable hard drives and flash memory devices.  What I really need is software that keeps track of what is where and when!  And - of course - something to tell me where the backups of that info are too! 

 

BTW there are no "old topics" here; there are quite a few that are simply resting though!