Monday, June 16, 2008

"You're Killing Me" said the Flash Drive

A number of reasons exist for flash drives (sometimes called pen drives) to go bad. Obviously, physical abuse of the flash drive, manufacturing errors and the like can contribute, but I’ve never had a flash drive fail. I suspect that one common mistake can greatly increase the chances of failure. If you do not disengage the flash drive properly it can contribute to the failure rate.

The proper procedure is to use the Windows "Safely remove hardware" process listed on the Windows task bar. The task bar icon looks link a small green arrow (pointing to the left and downward) which hovers over a gray rectangular object. If you remove your flash drive or other storage device without first using this feature and your system is writing files (temporary or otherwise) to the flash drive, you can corrupt the files being written which can subsequently cause the pen drive to fail.

1 comment:

William James said...

I needed to know this.

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