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#1
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Flash drives
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. -- When I am in the kitchen, I often kick one of my cat's balls. After I kick it, he will sometimes play with it for a few seconds to several minutes. His favorite are the ones that rattle. He'll play with any ball that makes noise. |
#2
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Flash drives
On 3/25/2013 10:06 PM, Daniel Prince wrote:
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. |
#3
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Flash drives
miso wrote:
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. -- When a cat sits in a human's lap both the human and the cat are usually happy. The human is happy because he thinks the cat is sitting on him/her because it loves her/him. The cat is happy because it thinks that by sitting on the human it is dominant over the human. |
#4
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Flash drives
On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:06:12 -0700, Daniel Prince
wrote: 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. 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. Read/write speeds should be noticeably faster on USB3 flash drives--but this is highly variable. If writing a lot of smallish files, no real difference in speed. So watch for those differences. |
#5
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Flash drives
On 3/26/2013 3:31 AM, Daniel Prince wrote:
miso wrote: 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. 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. |
#6
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Flash drives
Daniel Prince wrote:
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 |
#7
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Flash drives
wrote in message ... On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:06:12 -0700, Daniel Prince wrote: 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. 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. Read/write speeds should be noticeably faster on USB3 flash drives--but this is highly variable. If writing a lot of smallish files, no real difference in speed. So watch for those differences. |
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