10 Myths About Flash Drives You Don't Believe
Miscellaneous / / January 17, 2022
It's time to learn the whole truth about safely ejecting, formatting, and what happens if you stick the media in the charger.
Myth 1. If you remove the flash drive incorrectly, it will break.
The first and perhaps the most popular myth. We've all been taught that after writing data to a flash drive is complete, we need to click on the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray. Wait until Windows reports that the device can be turned off, and only then remove the media from the USB port.
So, it is not necessary to do so.
Port USB was specially designed for the so-called hot swap - that is, it allows you to insert and remove devices without additional steps. Absolutely optionalDoes Safely Ejecting From a USB Port Actually Do Anything? /Gizmodo unmount the flash drive before physically removing it.
Naturally, if you delete it while the files are being written, the unsaved data will be corrupted. But physically the drive will remain in order, and it can be safely used further. If the flash drive is not active (the LED on it does not blink), then it can be removed without the risk of data loss.
Of course, clicking on the button in the system tray will not take much time and, in principle, this is a good habit - this way you will excludeDo You Really Need to Safely Remove USB Flash Drives? / How-To Geek a situation in which the necessary information does not have time to be recorded. But if this is neglected, nothing terrible will happen.
Myth 2. USB drives are vulnerable to magnets
An old myth that few people remember now. He preserved since floppy disks: neodymium magnets could indeed damage the records on them. But this only applies to old floppy drives - modern hard drivesP. Gutmann. Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid‑State Memory / University of Auckland you don't destroy it.
And even a USB flash drive cannot be broken with a magnet, and even more soWill a magnet really destroy your smartphone or hard drive? / CNN Business. As well as solid state media, SD cards and other devices with flash memory.
The fact is that information was imprinted on diskettes by changing the magnetization of a plate coated with a ferromagnetic layer. Modern SSDs and flash drives use a very different storage method called NAND non-volatile memory.
Information is accumulated in separate memory cells based on transistors. You can drive as many toys as you like with refrigerator according to their carriers - they will not notice.
Myth 3. If you drop your flash drive into water, it will break.
The liquid itself will not harm the media, but it can cause a short circuit that will destroy the flash drive's circuits. That's just for this you need the device to be connected to power at the moment when it gets into the water.
That is, if you connect a USB flash drive with an extension cable to a computer and throw it into a bucket of water, the media will be damaged. Like, most likely, the port on your motherboard. It is not clear, however, why such experiments should be carried out.
If you just drop the flash drive into a puddle, nothing bad will happen. Wipe it off and leave it alone for a day to dry it. Some advise to put it in rice, but do this with electronics in general Not recommended. After the device is dry, you can reconnect it and copy files.
The only but: do not store important data on a flash drive that got wet in the past, because there is a small risk that corrosion will appear on its circuits over time. If you often take a USB device with you on extreme trips, buy a protected model with a rubberized waterproof case.
Myth 4. If you plug a flash drive into the charger, the data will be destroyed
Guys, I loaded the flash drive. Work has become twice as fast, really, try it! pic.twitter.com/qGTBVfDDmH
— Luchkov (@Luchkov) March 14, 2017
All modern charging blocks for mobile devices are equipped with a USB port, to which, in fact, the smartphone cable is connected. Some believe that if you put a USB flash drive into this slot, it will be "burned" by electricity or formatted. At one time, they even roamed on TwitterWhat happens if you try to charge a USB flash drive? We tested the joke empirically / Medialeaks "bad advice" like "Recharge your flash drive, it will work faster."
You can check for yourself, by the way. And make sure it's not true.
The current and voltage in the charger are about the same as what the motherboard creates with its USB ports, so nothing will happen to the flash drive. True, the speed of her work will not increase either - they checked it for funKingston charges flash drives / Sudo Null IT News experimenters from Kingston.
Myth 5. You can put a USB flash drive on the table and not worry about the data on it.
After reading the previous paragraph, you may have decided that only very naive people are capable of believing in this and that charging a USB flash drive is sheer stupidity. However, this is not quite true.
The fact is that USB drives, as well as SSDs, microSD cards, and SD cards that lie without power for a long time, begin to deteriorate.JEDEC SSD Specifications Explained / JEDEC. Yes, the memory in them is called non-volatile, but it works on the principle of a capacitor. And as you know, there is no battery that can store a charge forever without any leaks.USB flash drives: charging cannot be ignored / Sudo Null IT News.
Therefore, oddly enough, flash drives must be periodically recharged.
It is enough to connect the drive to the computer port for half an hour about once every six months or a year, and everything will be in order.
Myth 6. Formatting a flash drive permanently erases data
No, not at all. We have already written about how restore accidentally deleted data from different media. So, if you accidentally formatted your flash drive and there were vacation photos in there, you can easily get them back.
When the computer deletes something from the media, the data actually remains on it. Only the description is erased.
But it also means that anyone you lend your flash drive to, even after formatting, will be able to see what you stored on it before. So don't throw away your USB drives. Or follow special procedure rewriting before giving them into the wrong hands.
Myth 7. The flash drive should not be formatted if it is not completely full
It is known that the resource of a solid state drive is limited. That is, if your USB device has been used for a long time and often, over time, failed blocks will appear in its memory.
Some people who are far from information technology have a very strange idea of the durability of flash drives. From the above fact, they conclude that formatting greatly reduces the life of the device, and therefore, it is necessary to perform it as rarely as possible.
That is, you need to fill the memory of the flash drive to the last and clear it only when there is no space left on it.
But there is absolutely no need to bother.
This would make sense if each format completely zeroed out the contents of the media's memory. But, as we explained in the previous paragraph, the procedure removes only the description of the files. Unless, of course, you do a low-level format every time you clean the flash drive. Just use your device as normal and don't accumulate unnecessary files on it.
Myth 8. The volume of the flash drive decreases over time
Another popular myth is that if USB drives have a limited rewrite resource, then over time their volume will decrease. There are a lot of questions on the Internet in the spirit of “a 16 GB flash drive shows that it has only 200 MB on it, what should I do?”.
However, the number of gigabytes on your media cannot change. Even if you exhaust the resource of the solid state drive, you simply cannot add anything new to it, but you will still be able to read the old data. The above error occurs for a different reason.
This happens when several partitions appear on your disk, and the computer can only read one.
Most often, this is observed if you have done bootable flash drive for Windows or Linux. Some programs for creating live media split the resources of the USB drive into two partitions: one small, somewhere around 200 MB, for the OS bootloader; the second is for the system itself.
After reinstalling the OS, when you need to use the flash drive for other purposes, open system program Windows Disk Management, find your drive there and delete all partitions from it. Then format and the lost gigabytes will come back.
Myth 9. Manufacturers overestimate the capacity of flash drives
You bought yourself an 8 GB flash drive, connected it to your computer - and you see that in fact its volume is 7.6 GB. Where is the other 400 MB?
The fact is that media manufacturers considerWhy Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows? / How-To Geek the volume in decimal system, to make it more convenient: 1 GB is equal to 1,000 MB. The computer, on the other hand, counts in binary, so there are 1,024 (not 1,000) B in a kilobyte, 1,024 KB in a megabyte, and 1,024 MB in a gigabyte. 1024, or 2¹⁰.
That is, the volume of a flash drive is calculated as follows:
8 000 000 000 / (1 024 × 1 024 × 1 024) = 7,45
At rounding - all the same 7.6 GB.
In general, 8, 16, 64 GB are indicated so as not to confuse users with all kinds of number systems. Don't worry, it's normal.
Myth 10. Flash drives need to be defragmented
Particularly conscious citizens who are striving at all costs to “speed up and optimize” their computer can take such measures. But perhaps it is not worth mentioning that in defragmentation only hard drives are needed, and even then not always.
For a flash drive, just like an SSD, formatting will only hurt, since devices with solid-state memory do not like unnecessary overwrites. So leave the device alone, it will be more whole.
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