Flash drive question

Forums › Gadgets, robotics, home automation, electronics (including wearables) › Flash drive question

Rikkitic

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#198041 23-Jun-2016 14:01

Is this the right forum? Hard to decide. I want to buy a fistful of flash drives to fit my growing ISO collection. I don't care about performance since these will be rarely used, so they can be slow, I do care about durability for archiving. Can anyone give me any bulk buying tips for the best reliability at the lowest price?

I don't think there is ever a bad time to talk about how absurd war is, how old men make decisions and young people die. - George Clooney

timmmay

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#1579038 23-Jun-2016 14:06

I bought cheap ones from PBTech, these ones, 8GB and 16GB.

andrew027

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#1579053 23-Jun-2016 14:33

Flash drive?

frankv

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#1579058 23-Jun-2016 14:41

Would it be cheaper to buy SD or micro-SD cards?

Whatever, don't buy from AliExpress... very unreliable quality. And therefore I guess don't buy from TradeMe or eBay.

If money is more important than anything else, you could buy twice as many, test them out, and throw the failures away.

wellygary

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#1579061 23-Jun-2016 14:56

I do care about durability for archiving.

Then make sure you make more than one copy of everything and store them on at least two seperate devices

(and ideally in seperate locations- if you are feeling more than a bit paranoid)

richms

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#1579064 23-Jun-2016 15:06

I just use cheap kingston USB 3 drives for bootable things, work great and dont take forever.

Dont say you dont care about performance until you have tried some of the cheap terrible drives out, they are so slow they cant keep up with a download on ADSL and read speeds are not much better.

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nathan

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#1579090 23-Jun-2016 16:27

why UFDs if you care about durability?

surely spinning rust HDDs will have better price/size ratios especially if you are storing ISOs (which implied big)

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Rikkitic

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#1579095 23-Jun-2016 16:38

It's always a trade-off, isn't it? I thought about it but decided if I need to boot an ISO, I want to just be able to do it. When I have unused flash drives lying around, they tend to get filled up with things I don't want to lose and then it becomes a huge hassle putting the stuff somewhere else and then having to ask Rufus to make a bootable ISO before I can proceed. I would rather just have the bootable ISOs lying in drawer somewhere so I can just grab one when I need it.

I don't think there is ever a bad time to talk about how absurd war is, how old men make decisions and young people die. - George Clooney