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April, 2011 TEChWaTCh USB Drives: How Long Do They Last? By Walter Salm
500GB HDD in a really bad, destruc- tive crash, followed closely by the failure of an external HDD that con- tained all my backup files. The odds against two such events happening within the same time frame must be astronomical, but where computers are concerned, Murphy's Law super- sedes Moore's Law, the Law of Averages, probability, and every other law you can think of. In an absolutely overwhelming
L
proof of this maxim, my ever-faithful 8GB USB dongle has also failed — not totally, but just enough to make me retire it from active duty. This tiny piece of hardware is the heart and soul of all my work on U.S. Tech as well as containing a bunch of per- sonal files. It had been so good, so reliable, and suddenly it has stopped
ast month, I talked about the confluence of two hard drive crashes — my main computer's
accepting new files, and has become increasingly reluctant to give up files to be copied elsewhere. I have regretfully retired it,
forcing an older 4GB dongle into temporary service for this month's issue. I saved everything on this flash drive, and readily moved it from one computer to another as the need dictated. It was always there for me, always the trooper, always ultra-reliable. Until now.
Rude Awakening My rude awakening forced me
to take a long look at what others are saying about flash drives on the Internet. The dichotomy of opinion is unbelievable. Some quotes said that a flash drive is only good for 100 or 200 write/read cycles, while others talk about 10,000 or more cycles. Obviously, the longer life goes with higher quality — and higher-
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priced — units. But longevity is not the only
factor in making the choice; an even more important specification is determined by the read and write speeds. The retired drive is an 8GB PNY drive purchased online from
newegg.com about three years ago. I have an exact lookalike purchased from Wal-Mart on the cheap about two years ago that is super-slow. In the process of trying to find a
speedy USB flash drive, I read through the specs for dozens of drives at the
newegg.com web site. Only two of the 8GB flash drives list- ed actual speeds. In general, if the transfer speed
is not listed, it means that the speed is not something that the manufactur- er wants to talk about. In other words, the drive is slow. If you've ever pur- chased USB drives at Wal-Mart, you know that they have been slow, because Wal-Mart sells by price more than anything else. I once bought a pair of 2GB SD cards at Office Depot; they were on cards at the checkout for impulse buyers like me, and the price seemed unbelievably low. I bought them, and tried them out and had to discard them as too slow to be usable for anything at all.
Testing Operating Speed Most recently, I purchased two
8GB USB drives from
newegg.com priced at $23 for the Corsair and $29 for the Patriot. The Corsair is cov- ered with a rubberized skin and has a conventional removable (and easy- to-lose) cap. The Patriot has an inte- gral slide-up cover that can't get lost, but leaves the USB connector exposed, even when closed. Both have a hole to accept a lanyard string. They both had fairly good speeds listed in the specs. I have found both drives to be
blazingly fast, and I finally found a quick and easy way to test them. I was able to download some freeware from
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/ usb_
devices_view.html and I can highly recommend this utility. It writes about 100MB of sequential files and then reads them back. Read time is always much faster than write speed. Using this software, the Corsair
had a write speed of 6.64MB/sec and a read speed of 12.05MB/sec. The Patriot could write at 8.18MB/sec and could read at 13.18MB/sec. The utility will list virtually
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every USB device that has ever been connected to your computer, so you have to search carefully to find the drives you want to test. The test itself takes very little time — maybe 20 seconds.
USB 2.0 Limitations One of the caveats to keep in
mind: most computers use USB 2.0, and this typically has a top speed of 60MB/sec. So don't try to get any- thing that's faster, since it will be money wasted. But I haven't seen anything on the market that any- where near that speed. As for USB 3.0, it theoretically provides up to 625MB/sec, but I have yet to see this on a computer, and for sure there are no memory devices that can take advantage of this speed — at least not today. Sometimes USB flash drives
will be listed by “class”. This is dir - ectly related to the speed. For exam- ple, the Corsair with its 6.64MB/sec write speed would be a Class 6 (maybe Class 7), and the Patriot would be Class 8. To find much faster flash
drives, Compact Flash is the answer, but this requires an adapter to plug into the USB drive and isn't nearly the small size of a USB dongle that you can hang on a lanyard around your neck for safekeeping. And that lanyard can be very important. I lost a USB flash drive with many crucial files because I thought it was safe in my pants pocket on a Trans-Atlantic flight. I have found that wearing the dongle around my neck does not set off metal alarms at airport security checks, but my belt buckle does. Many USB drives are very low-
end, made in large quantities — often rejects from higher-priced drive pro- duction runs — to be used as give- aways at trade shows and sales pre- sentations. After all, a low-end 2GB flash drive is much easier to take away from a presentation than a CD ROM, fits in your pocket, and it can be viewed immediately. If you go to your hotel room and want to view a CD, you may be out of luck if your computer is a netbook, so I always pack my external DVD drive in my checked baggage when I travel, along with a small external keyboard and mouse. However, many if not most of these giveaway dongles are very low end, and if put to any serious use, will very likely lock up and otherwise lose the files you try to save. After you copy those sales presentations, most of these free USB dongles should be relegated to the garbage. They've done their intended job and are definitely not going to be depend- able workhorses in the future. Yet I've had some that have
worked well in a limited capacity for quite a while. It just depends on how much reliance you place on the device. r
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