Flash drives

[Daniel Prince]

I want to get one or two new flash drives. I have noticed that 128
GB drives now cost less per GB than 64 GB drives. Do 128 GB flash
drives have any compatibility problems with Windows XP SP3?

I have noticed that most flash drives now seem to have only one or
two years of warranty. Why is this? Do these drives have very
short life spans? I would be writing to the flash drive less than
six times a year. Do I need to worry about the life span of flash
drives?

Is Patriot Memory a good brand of flash drive? Thank you in advance
for any help.

 

[miso]

I want to get one or two new flash drives. I have noticed that 128
GB drives now cost less per GB than 64 GB drives. Do 128 GB flash
drives have any compatibility problems with Windows XP SP3?

I have noticed that most flash drives now seem to have only one or
two years of warranty. Why is this? Do these drives have very
short life spans? I would be writing to the flash drive less than
six times a year. Do I need to worry about the life span of flash
drives?

Is Patriot Memory a good brand of flash drive? Thank you in advance
for any help.

By flash, I assume you mean SSD of the multilevel flavor.

Unless you only turn on your PC six times a year, you will be writing to
the drive all the time. Windows has logs at the very least. You can
reduce the amount of writing the OS does to the SSD.

However, it seems to me you will not have "trim" if you run XP. That
said, I dual boot my notebook, and only the win7 partition has trim.

I suggest getting SSD that rhymes with Pintel, Zintel, Lintel, or
Fintel. If you insist on getting any other flash, I suggest loaded up a
free OS like linux and run the SSD a while. What you want to avoid is
copying your data to the SSD then having the drive fail. I had that
happen with a SSD that didn't rhyme with Sintel, Vintel, or Tintel.
Rather it was an OCZ.

I have a small Intel Atom PC with a SSD that rhymes with Bintel. I've
run it about 2.5 years 24 and 7. So far no problems. I turned off
indexing. I don't use a swap file. I enable trim. I use a RAM cache for
the browser.

The SSD in my notebook, which rhymes with Kintel, is too new to tell.
I've only run it about 6 months. So far so good.

I have used Patriot RAM. No problems. The only SSD I will use rhymes
with Jintel.

 

[Daniel Prince]

By flash, I assume you mean SSD of the multilevel flavor.

I did not write my original message very clearly. What I meant was
usb flash drive.

 

[miso]

I did not write my original message very clearly. What I meant was
usb flash drive.

My personal choice is to use a card reader and a compact flash card or
SHDC. It is not quite as clean as using a usb drive, but the the quality
of thumb drives can be variable.

A friend was using some 32Gbyte thumb drives to deliver data to a server
farm, and the failure rate of those thumb drive is quite high.

I like the SIIG card readers. They don't cost much more than the bottom
of the line readers.

Ebay is full of schlocky thumb drives. Factory fall out. Chinese copies.
Some don't even have the stated capacity. The SDHC and compact flash
cards are designed for cameras and phones, i.e. situations that get
daily use. I've used Patriot SDHC and microSDHC without issue. Also PNY,
Samsung, and even Centon. The flash cards seem reasonably reliable.

I leave a 32Gbyte in my notebook at all times. Most notebooks these days
have a SHDC slot. No problems.

 

[Arno]

I want to get one or two new flash drives. I have noticed that 128
GB drives now cost less per GB than 64 GB drives. Do 128 GB flash
drives have any compatibility problems with Windows XP SP3?

I have noticed that most flash drives now seem to have only one or
two years of warranty. Why is this? Do these drives have very
short life spans? I would be writing to the flash drive less than
six times a year. Do I need to worry about the life span of flash
drives?

Depending on your access pattern, you might be. If you do a lot
of writing (video-editing, for example), you may kill them
pretty fast. Also, the hardware is not the best and there still
are the occasional firmware defects.

At this time, I would say that relying on SSDs is not a good idea.
Better have a backup on conventional disk.

Is Patriot Memory a good brand of flash drive? Thank you in advance
for any help.

That sounds like "unbranded", i.e. worst possible.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

There are two speeds: USB2 and USB3--and USB3 costs more. If there is
no speed stated, it is USB2 (as USB3 generally has a price premium for
the same capacity--so they list it to get that higher price). Both
should work in the same USB port--but do you have a USB3 port (XP)?

Thus, a 128GB USB2 could cost less than a 64GB USB3 flash drive. Don't
get overly worried about the life span of the flash drive unless the
mfr has a history of problems. Look at what happened to HDD mfrs and
their warranties. Used to be 3-5 yrs--now mostly 1-2-3 years. Both may
be driven by obsolecense and rapidly-changing manufacturing
technologies rather than anything else.

Its more driven by what the longest warrantys
on offer for mass market consumer drives are.