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#46
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USB thumb drives.
In article , Jimmy Wilkinson Knife
wrote: Do these thumb drives last forever, or should their contents be transferred to the latest USB drives? Theoretically, they should last a long time but a lot can destroy them like moisture and a seemingly miniscule amount of bending. I'd transfer their contents to more recent, faster USB keys. I was given one that was stood upon by a 15 stone man. The data was not recoverable. then it was junk. |
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#47
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USB thumb drives.
Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Thu, 17 May 2018 10:11:25 +0100, default wrote: On Thu, 17 May 2018 07:49:55 +1000, 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. Do these thumb drives last forever, or should their contents be transferred to the latest USB drives? The number of write cycles determines the life. Many manufacturers specify 10,000. If that's true, the life expectancy is not likely to be exceeded in normal use, like storing files or using it to transfer files from one device to another. That said, the use to which flash memory is put can also determine it's life expectancy. If, for instance, it is used in a data-logger, back-ups, or recording system where the data is re-written or written-over in the course of normal usage. Microsoft allow you to use them to expand your system RAM. I guess that would wear them out ****ing quickly. If you were referring to paging, I think you'd be quite surprised how a modern system handles paging. I think you will find "maintenance activity" on Windows 10, amounts to more wear of your SSD, than paging. This includes a 1GB file that Window Defender keeps for caching (it's keeping track of a scan there or something), the 1GB+ file windows.edb that the Search Indexer keeps pecking at, and the USN Journal, are examples of overheads. I've had a USN Journal with a size of 15GB (collected over time), and I'm not sure whether Windows has any automated maintenance for USN Journal or not. (You can remove the USN Journal yourself, but it should simply start a new one afterwards. Entries are added, every time a file is added or deleted from the partition, making the daily addition rate small.) I tried some experiments with the pagefile, and the system wouldn't actually page. There was a tiny "spike" where a few writes to the pagefile leaked through, until some other process in Windows alleviated the pressure. I even tried to get two processes to consume RAM at the same time, and got a slightly larger "spike" when they hit the end. But the behavior is no where near as bad as the paging behavior would be in Win2K or WinXP, where they really did try to use pagefile.sys on the C: hard drive as an actual RAM extension. I'm probably not using the right kinds of test cases for this, which could be why I'm failing to get an exceedingly bad result from the pagefile. And before Sinofsky was fired, this was what he was on about, in some blog post. Although (of course) he uses different metrics than I would have used to answer this question. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/...-state-drives/ You have the option of disabling the pagefile. On modern systems with a lot of RAM, this is looking like a better option all the time. Hibernating a system will use some SSD writes, but the size of what is written, is proportional to what part of RAM is in usage. If your photo editor had a 1GB image open, hibernating the system at that point might write out 1GB of RAM from that operation, to the hiberfile. The system has a small contribution to add, which best case, could be as small as 350MB or so (that's about as small as the core of the OS can get, when it's under pressure). I don't know if the OS is clever enough to purge runtime caches before writing the hiberfile or not. Certainly there is a tendency to not "trust" such caches, when the system comes back up. Hibernating the kernel (for Fast Start) will cause a small amount of writes at shutdown. Like the 350MB metric above for "minimum core OS size", the space needed to hibernate the kernel and drivers is quite small. The fastest way to study this, is probably to use your SSD toolbox, shut down and boot a few times, then check in the toolbox to see how many terabytes of writes had been done. And figure out from that, what kind of "rate" your usage pattern causes. I don't hibernate my systems here, only sleep them, so I won't have any hibernate contributions adding to my results. (Any computers running here, are usually plugged into my modest UPS, which is why I can't afford to have too many computers running at one time. There's just enough hold-up time, to manually do two shutdowns before the battery is flat :-) ) Paul |
#48
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USB thumb drives.
"Paul" wrote in message
news wasbit wrote: "Jason" wrote in message ... In article , lid says... nothing lasts forever, but the good ones should last a very long time. unfortunately, some are not particularly good, possibly counterfeit. A friend and former colleague is a very experienced EE who works independently as a software and circuit designer and also writes technical articles on computer topics for magazines that you and I probably read (and journal articles we probably don't...). I have asked him the same questions about these gadgets. His response: "To a first approximation ALL such devices on eBay are counterfeit." Be careful. Buy them from places like Newegg or Frys. I have a 1TB thumb drive, bought me as a present at a cost of £10 (13.5$). Considering its price, I was dubious as to its capacity. Windows shows it as 917GB with 489GB used & 428GB free space. The 489GB was the most I could scrape together & took nearly a day to write to the drive. You can use fsutil to make a test file on your source drive for testing. Now, watch in amazement, how (assuming this fits on the remaining space on C: ), the file takes no time at all to create. If you use the 7ZIP right-click CRC32 hash calculator, you'll be able to read this file off your C: drive at 800MB/sec (even though the storage device might be capable of much less). fsutil file createnew C:\users\wasbit\Downloads\big.bin 900000000000 The source drive should be NTFS for this. Once the file is created on the source drive, *now*, use File Explorer to copy it to the target device, and then the real testing will begin. This allows crafting precisely sized test files. The source file (big.bin) is likely "sparse" and the file is technically filled with zeros. This doesn't matter to the destination drive though, which will have to do the usual amount of work (as Windows isn't smart enough to preserve a sparse file during copy, and expands the fake contents as needed). Sparse files can be made very quickly. Sparse files take the normal amount of time to copy (copy will be limited by the destination write rate). ******* I would be interested in the brand and model number of this mythically large (13.5$) storage devices. Was the brand Godzilla or Mothra ? Did it come from the ocean ? Was it angry ? Paul Bought from https://www.wish.com/ Windows reports 372GB file copy will take 18 hours. Start 10.05 am Speed 5.3-5.8 MB/sec 5.00 pm 37%,- flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB Left to copy 272GB, 11.5 hours 7.00 pm 50% - flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB 8.00 pm 73% - flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB copying stopped 8.01 pm 37GB big2.bin file copy started 8.35pm 36% 14GB copied - flash drive used 671GB, Free 27.3GB 8.50pm 100% - flash drive used 898MB, Free 19GB -- Regards wasbit |
#49
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USB thumb drives.
Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Thu, 17 May 2018 14:12:54 +0100, Doomsdrzej wrote: On Thu, 17 May 2018 07:49:55 +1000, 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. Do these thumb drives last forever, or should their contents be transferred to the latest USB drives? Theoretically, they should last a long time but a lot can destroy them like moisture and a seemingly miniscule amount of bending. I'd transfer their contents to more recent, faster USB keys. I was given one that was stood upon by a 15 stone man. The data was not recoverable. They do make rugged ones. https://www.amazon.com/LaCie-XtremKe.../dp/B00AMMI6VQ https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414162,00.asp "...crushing force (it will withstand 10 tons)" An Amazon review, claims the internal USB key portion, will separate from the threaded screw cap, so while the outside is rugged, the connection between the innards and the cap isn't perfect. HTH, Paul |
#50
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USB thumb drives.
wasbit wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message news wasbit wrote: "Jason" wrote in message ... In article , lid says... nothing lasts forever, but the good ones should last a very long time. unfortunately, some are not particularly good, possibly counterfeit. A friend and former colleague is a very experienced EE who works independently as a software and circuit designer and also writes technical articles on computer topics for magazines that you and I probably read (and journal articles we probably don't...). I have asked him the same questions about these gadgets. His response: "To a first approximation ALL such devices on eBay are counterfeit." Be careful. Buy them from places like Newegg or Frys. I have a 1TB thumb drive, bought me as a present at a cost of £10 (13.5$). Considering its price, I was dubious as to its capacity. Windows shows it as 917GB with 489GB used & 428GB free space. The 489GB was the most I could scrape together & took nearly a day to write to the drive. You can use fsutil to make a test file on your source drive for testing. Now, watch in amazement, how (assuming this fits on the remaining space on C: ), the file takes no time at all to create. If you use the 7ZIP right-click CRC32 hash calculator, you'll be able to read this file off your C: drive at 800MB/sec (even though the storage device might be capable of much less). fsutil file createnew C:\users\wasbit\Downloads\big.bin 900000000000 The source drive should be NTFS for this. Once the file is created on the source drive, *now*, use File Explorer to copy it to the target device, and then the real testing will begin. This allows crafting precisely sized test files. The source file (big.bin) is likely "sparse" and the file is technically filled with zeros. This doesn't matter to the destination drive though, which will have to do the usual amount of work (as Windows isn't smart enough to preserve a sparse file during copy, and expands the fake contents as needed). Sparse files can be made very quickly. Sparse files take the normal amount of time to copy (copy will be limited by the destination write rate). ******* I would be interested in the brand and model number of this mythically large (13.5$) storage devices. Was the brand Godzilla or Mothra ? Did it come from the ocean ? Was it angry ? Paul Bought from https://www.wish.com/ Windows reports 372GB file copy will take 18 hours. Start 10.05 am Speed 5.3-5.8 MB/sec 5.00 pm 37%,- flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB Left to copy 272GB, 11.5 hours 7.00 pm 50% - flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB 8.00 pm 73% - flash drive used 861GB, Free 56.3GB copying stopped 8.01 pm 37GB big2.bin file copy started 8.35pm 36% 14GB copied - flash drive used 671GB, Free 27.3GB 8.50pm 100% - flash drive used 898MB, Free 19GB Time for the testing tools. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and...-with-h2testw/ Paul |
#51
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USB thumb drives.
In article , wasbit
wrote: Windows reports 372GB file copy will take 18 hours. that's just under 6 mbyte/sec. something is *very* wrong. |
#52
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USB thumb drives.
nospam wrote:
In article , wasbit wrote: Windows reports 372GB file copy will take 18 hours. that's just under 6 mbyte/sec. something is *very* wrong. There are older sticks that do this. I have a Sandisk USB2 that did 3MB/sec on writes. (It had Ultra in the name, not Extreme. Their Extreme ones tend to behave better.) There was at least one USB2 stick, that managed to produce less than 1MB/sec performance. The protocol may have been USB2 (at the connector), but the transfer to NAND inside was decidedly lacking. Paul |
#53
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USB thumb drives.
In article , Paul
wrote: Windows reports 372GB file copy will take 18 hours. that's just under 6 mbyte/sec. something is *very* wrong. There are older sticks that do this. very old and not particularly good ones. usb 3 sticks typically do around 5-10x that, sometimes more. this one claims over 400 mbyte/sec, likely limited by the *other* drive: http://www.poweredbymushkin.com/Home...item/33-ventur a-ultra/750-ventura-ultra-60gb-flash-drive#specifications a lesser spec model is rated at 200 mbyte/sec read, 40mbyte write: http://www.poweredbymushkin.com/Home...item/20-ventur a-plus/706-ventura-plus-32gb-usb-flash-drive |
#54
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USB thumb drives.
"Paul" wrote in message
news Time for the testing tools. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and...-with-h2testw/ ###################### Chip Genius Description: [F:]USB Mass Storage Device(Generic Flash Disk) Device Type: Mass Storage Device Protocal Version: USB 2.00 Current Speed: High Speed Max Current: 200mA USB Device ID: VID = 0000 PID = 7777 Serial Number: EB541BB0 Device Vendor: Generic Device Name: Mass Storage Device Revision: 0106 Manufacturer: Generic Product Model: Flash Disk Product Revision: 8.00 Controller Vendor: Alcor Micro Controller Part-Number: AU6989SN-GTB/AU6998SN [F206] - F/W FA02 Flash ID code: ADDE14AB - Hynix H27QCG8D2F5R - 1CE/Single Channel [MLC-16K] - Total Capacity = 8GB Tools on web: http://dl.mydigit.net/special/up/alcor.html Possible Flash Part-Number [1CE]H27QCG8D2F5R x 1 pcs/Channel x 1 Channel Flash ID mapping table [Channel 0] [Channel 1] ADDE14AB424A -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- ################################ FFT - Volume File Test FAKEFLASHTEST v1.0.9 [SSi] F: New Volume DRIVE 2 - 917.9GiB Generic Flash Disk Warning: Testing 19527MB out of reported drive size of 939999MB Writing 97 x 200MB files... 00:00:00 Writing F:\FAKETEST1.tmp 00:00:34 Writing F:\FAKETEST2.tmp, 00:39:45 remaining 00:01:11 Writing F:\FAKETEST3.tmp, 00:53:30 remaining 00:01:47 Writing F:\FAKETEST4.tmp, 00:59:33 remaining 00:02:22 Writing F:\FAKETEST5.tmp, 01:02:31 remaining 00:02:57 Writing F:\FAKETEST6.tmp, 01:04:18 remaining 00:03:31 Writing F:\FAKETEST7.tmp, 01:05:07 remaining 00:04:06 Writing F:\FAKETEST8.tmp, 01:05:51 remaining 00:04:41 Writing F:\FAKETEST9.tmp, 01:06:17 remaining 00:05:15 Writing F:\FAKETEST10.tmp, 01:06:19 remaining 00:05:50 Writing F:\FAKETEST11.tmp, 01:06:25 remaining 00:06:25 Writing F:\FAKETEST12.tmp, 01:06:24 remaining 00:06:59 Writing F:\FAKETEST13.tmp, 01:06:10 remaining 00:07:35 Writing F:\FAKETEST14.tmp, 01:06:08 remaining 00:08:09 Writing F:\FAKETEST15.tmp, 01:05:47 remaining Checking... DATA ERROR! Verifying files 1 - 15... ----------------------- TEST FINISHED 3000MB of filespace was tested. Test Time = 00:08:46 TEST FAILED: Only 0MB out of the 3000MB tested were good. Deleting test files - please wait... Finished. THIS DRIVE IS PROBABLY FAKE (COUNTERFEIT) OR FAULTY - THE CONTENTS MAY NOW BE CORRUPT! ############################ Drive (quick) formatted NTFS H2testw reports test will take 29 hours -- Regards wasbit |
#56
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USB thumb drives.
wasbit wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message news Time for the testing tools. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and...-with-h2testw/ ###################### Chip Genius Controller Vendor: Alcor Micro Controller Part-Number: AU6989SN-GTB/AU6998SN [F206] - F/W FA02 Flash ID code: ADDE14AB - Hynix H27QCG8D2F5R - 1CE/Single Channel [MLC-16K] - Total Capacity = 8GB Proving once again, that you really can get $13 worth of storage, by paying $13 :-) I take it, when they modified the declaration on the drive, the controller was limited to declaring 2TB and could not declare a larger number. Or they would have set it to an even higher number. Paul |
#57
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USB thumb drives.
Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 19 May 2018 14:17:44 -0500, (Ant) wrote: Ken Blake wrote: On Fri, 18 May 2018 14:45:42 -0700, wrote: I have several HP 8gb devices, metal cases, and NO keyring hole at all. I also have a Lexar 128 GB USB3 device that is the size of a USB Mouse receiver, so clearly also NO keyring hole. Hell, IT is barely big enough to grab hold of when trying to remove it! I have one even smaller. It's completely flat, perhaps 1/16 of an inch thick, and about the size of a small postage stamp. If I remember correctly, it's 64KB. I got it as a distribution of a piece of software. 64 KB?!?! As I said, If I remember correctly. It was very small, but perhaps not that small. 16MB? 32MB? I probably got the number right and the unit wrong--64MB. 16 MB sounds more accurate. Not sure what you can do with 16 KB. That's like in the 80s. -- Quote of the Week: "The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?" --Seth Shostak Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly. /\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.home.dhs.org / /\ /\ \ Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail privately. If credit- | |o o| | ing, then please kindly use Ant nickname and URL/link. \ _ / ( ) |
#58
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USB thumb drives.
In article , Ant
wrote: Not sure what you can do with 16 KB. That's like in the 80s. one could do a lot... https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch2-5.html MIT's original design called for just 4K words of fixed memory and 256 words of erasable (at the time, two computers for redundancy were still under consideration). By June 1963, the figures had grown to 10K of fixed and 1K of erasable. The next jump was to 12K of fixed, with MIT still insisting that the memory requirement for an autonomous lunar mission could be kept under 16K! Fixed memory leapt to 24K and then finally to 36K words, and erasable memory had a final configuration of 2K words. |
#59
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USB thumb drives.
On Thu, 17 May 2018 07:49:55 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:
Do these thumb drives last forever, or should their contents be transferred to the latest USB drives? I can only speak from personal experience. I've got several thumb drives, all from SanDisk. - 512MB Cruzer Micro - 4GB Cruzer Titanium - 16GB Cruzer Contour - 64GB Extreme (USB 3.0) - 128GB Extreme Pro (USB 3.0) I ordered the 64GB and 128GB drives from a shop in Hong Kong (through eBay). The 64GB drive is used /all the time/. I transfer MKV files to it, watch them on my BluRay disc player and then I delete them. I've been doing that for years now. Never an error. On a rare occasion, the MKV freezes when playing, but that could also be caused by the file itself or the disc player. Rebooting the disc player always solves the problem. I once bought a (supposedly) 4GB flash drive from DaneElec. Never got it to work properly and it certainly wasn't 4GB. -- s|b |
#60
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USB thumb drives.
On Sun, 20 May 2018 01:53:56 +0100, Paul wrote:
Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote: On Thu, 17 May 2018 10:11:25 +0100, default wrote: On Thu, 17 May 2018 07:49:55 +1000, 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. Do these thumb drives last forever, or should their contents be transferred to the latest USB drives? The number of write cycles determines the life. Many manufacturers specify 10,000. If that's true, the life expectancy is not likely to be exceeded in normal use, like storing files or using it to transfer files from one device to another. That said, the use to which flash memory is put can also determine it's life expectancy. If, for instance, it is used in a data-logger, back-ups, or recording system where the data is re-written or written-over in the course of normal usage. Microsoft allow you to use them to expand your system RAM. I guess that would wear them out ****ing quickly. If you were referring to paging, I think you'd be quite surprised how a modern system handles paging. I think you will find "maintenance activity" on Windows 10, amounts to more wear of your SSD, than paging. This includes a 1GB file that Window Defender keeps for caching (it's keeping track of a scan there or something), the 1GB+ file windows.edb that the Search Indexer keeps pecking at, and the USN Journal, are examples of overheads. I've had a USN Journal with a size of 15GB (collected over time), and I'm not sure whether Windows has any automated maintenance for USN Journal or not. (You can remove the USN Journal yourself, but it should simply start a new one afterwards. Entries are added, every time a file is added or deleted from the partition, making the daily addition rate small.) I have noticed my SSD maxed out now and then when Windows decides I'm not using the computer. No idea what it's up to, since I assume SSDs don't need defragmenting. Do SSDs slow down when they're nearly full, or when they're old? I'm sure mine isn't as fast as it used to be. I tried some experiments with the pagefile, and the system wouldn't actually page. There was a tiny "spike" where a few writes to the pagefile leaked through, until some other process in Windows alleviated the pressure. I even tried to get two processes to consume RAM at the same time, and got a slightly larger "spike" when they hit the end. But the behavior is no where near as bad as the paging behavior would be in Win2K or WinXP, where they really did try to use pagefile.sys on the C: hard drive as an actual RAM extension. I'm probably not using the right kinds of test cases for this, which could be why I'm failing to get an exceedingly bad result from the pagefile. And before Sinofsky was fired, this was what he was on about, in some blog post. Although (of course) he uses different metrics than I would have used to answer this question. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/...-state-drives/ You have the option of disabling the pagefile. On modern systems with a lot of RAM, this is looking like a better option all the time. I disable hibernation on systems where the RAM is a good proportion the size of the SSD, as it eats a good chunk of the free space. But when I've ever turned off a pagefile, I always end up with something saying it's out of memory when it isn't. I work on the assumption that a pagefile isn't used unless it has to be. -- Which is it, is man one of god's blunders or is god one of man's? -- Friedrich Nietzsche |
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