The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #127388   Message #2841249
Posted By: Geoff the Duck
16-Feb-10 - 04:37 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Flash drives: best ones for music, video
Subject: RE: Tech: Flash drives: best ones for music, video
Just a warning - Flash drives are very handy and I found the portable Apps suite incredibly useful moving between Windoze PCs - BUT they can be unreliable long-term. We have had two separate Flash Drives fail without warning. One didn't have anything serious on it, but the other contained work which wasn't backed up elsewhere.
According to a computer technician, they only support a limited number of "save" operations before they fail. His advice was never to work on a file while it is on the drive, things such as Word documents will auto-save and every save is one subtracted from the total before it fails. Advice was to only use it to transfer files between computers, do the work and save it on a computer hard drive, then copy the file back onto the flash drive. That way you only save once rather than an indefinite number of times. Other advice was to always keep the contents backed up on one or more computer, so if it fries your data it is not completely lost.
Quack!
GtD.