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Old May 17th 18, 12:38 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Default USB thumb drives.

Peter Jason wrote:
On Wed, 16 May 2018 18:03:17 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Peter Jason
wrote:

I have many USB2 & USB3 going back 10+ years, and
now some are "socket specific" on my 10 YO
computer motherboard (some USB3s will work on some
sockets; even USB2 sockets) and not others.

then the logicboard and/or the devices are either defective or not
fully compliant.

Do these thumb drives last forever, or should
their contents be transferred to the latest USB
drives?

nothing lasts forever, but the good ones should last a very long time.
unfortunately, some are not particularly good, possibly counterfeit.


Thansk, what are the good ones? What brand and
are there "military-grade" superlative ones?


A couple of years ago, a company appeared out of no-where
on the Internet, selling SLC sticks. But they've disappeared,
as the USB stick market is price-sensitive, and nobody
wanted to pay $100 for a USB stick of relatively low capacity.
The company looked like a new entrant, and actually advertised.
Most of the companies selling stuff like this, are sitting
on a small stockpile of chips, and could run out at any time.

If you want some items for "show and tell", Digikey shows a few.
Some are actually in stock.

https://www.digikey.ca/products/en/m...=1&pageSize=25

Do not accept SLC drives at larger than 8GB capacity. The thinking
is, an 8GB one is probably dual channel, with two 4GB chips.
Anyone offering a 32GB stick, could easily build such a thing
using a single 32GB TLC chip (which you don't want).

Also, the write rates should not be too fast. A dual channel one
for older SLC sticks, will write at around 15MB/sec or so.

The 1GB product for $35 or so, has an interesting datasheet.

https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%2...eries_Spec.pdf

"The drives have the extraordinary endurance of 60,000
program/erase cycles, while most MLC-based USB drives
on the market have less than 3,000 program/erase cycles.

The Industrial Grade USB Drive is ideal for industrial
application such as medical, IPC and automation applications."

So that shows you, how a USB stick *should* have worked :-)
Not how they work today.

*******

A good rule of thumb in 2018 is, *don't* use USB sticks
for archival storage. They're for point-to-point transfers
via sneaker-net. Don't write 20 years worth of bank statements
on them, and bury the sticks in the back yard, because when you
dig them up, the data will be gone.

Paul
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