USB Drive Safety

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but a triplicator is not a usb drive, its an eSata/FireWire HDD, or 3 combined into 1 actually

I was looking through some old emails, and found one announcing that this thread had been updated - I wanted to take this moment to offer some thanks for the advice.

personality i've had a experience of a usb stick corrupting on me. I feel that a external hard drive is alot more reliable.

I work as IT support and as long as your sensible, flash drives are no problem at all. A few basic things still stand though, don't use it for long term storage and don't edit files while they're on the drive (copy them to the computer then edit them, I get students coming in to my office all the time with corrupted files because they pulled the memory stick out while it was saving).

You are right in saying that hard disks are a consumable, that's how we view them at work, that they will eventually wear out. Memory sticks are different because they have no moving parts and are thus less likely to break.

EDIT:

I should read things properly first:

happens all the time.

That is always why I click on "safely remove" or "eject" prior to pulling the device out of the connector.

This prevents doing anything impulsive.

ruveyn

Well that's why we tell people not to work off the drive itself, but to copy it to the desktop or My Documents folder first, edit it, then copy it back when you're done. Also, most USB drives these days have lights on them that let you know when data is being written to it. I have never once used "safely remove device" and I have never had any problems.

If you yank the travel drive after it has quieted down, you are golden.

ruveyn

exactly