BuyDig has 64GB Lexar S50 USB 2.0 Flash Drive on sale for $4.99. Slickdeals Cashback is available for this store (PC extension required, before checkout). Shipping is free.
Thanks to Slickdeals Deal Editor iconian for posting this deal.
About this product:
Easily transfer, store, and share important files
Reliably stores and transfers photos, videos, files, and more
There are still spurious reports of various Windows functions (like creating installation USB sticks and system recovery images) having problems with USB 3 ports. I suspect it's related to flaky drivers, since these bootable USB sticks rely on generic drivers. USB 2.0 always works, but doesn't do you any good if your computer only has USB 3 ports. Plugging a USB 2.0 flash drive (or USB 2.0 hub) into the port seems to do the trick and force it to operate in USB 2.0 mode.
It's a niche application, but one that's important enough IMHO not to dismiss.
That said, an Amazon review of this drive (8GB model) puts the 4k write speeds at 0.003 MB/s. This is the type of flash drive which takes 8 hours to copy a folder of MP3 files. I would avoid it for this reason. There are flash drives which can exceed 1 MB/s 4k speeds. It's well worth paying a little extra for one of those.
Don't use flash for long-term backups. The way flash memory works is that it stores a charge inside a cell. That charge slowly leaks out over time, and eventually your data is gone. This is the problem Samsung ran into with their EVO 840 drives. They manufactured those flash cells using a smaller lithography than the 830. When you shrink the cells down, the volume decreases as the cube, but the surface area decreases only as the square. So the amount of stored charge decreased a lot more than the surface area it could leak out. And as a result, the drives were losing data in less than a year.
Samsung's eventual fix was to update the firmware to make it rewrite the data (refreshing the charge in the cell) more frequently. But that's only possible if the drive is powered on regularly.
USB flash drives seem to made with lower grade flash, which is actually a good thing in this context. Lower grade usually means a larger lithography, which makes it more resistant to this type of data degradation. I've personally had USB flash drives retain data for at least 6 years, and have seen reports of them lasting over 10 years. But just because of how they work, I would not trust them for any sort of long-term data backup. If you're going to make a backup, toss it in the drawer, and forget about it for 5+ years, go with magnetic (good for decades), optical (good for 10-20 years, or centuries for M-Disc), or cloud storage (good as long as the cloud storage company keeps its equipment updated).
You answered all the questions that I had and answered some that I didn't know I needed to ask.
In for one. My HP Laser Printer needs a minimum 16GB thumbdrive to store print jobs. Didn't want to use a 128GB laying around so for $5 this 64GB (even though still too large) does the trick nicely.
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and with that I am out !
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It's a niche application, but one that's important enough IMHO not to dismiss.
That said, an Amazon review of this drive (8GB model) puts the 4k write speeds at 0.003 MB/s. This is the type of flash drive which takes 8 hours to copy a folder of MP3 files. I would avoid it for this reason. There are flash drives which can exceed 1 MB/s 4k speeds. It's well worth paying a little extra for one of those.
Don't use flash for long-term backups. The way flash memory works is that it stores a charge inside a cell. That charge slowly leaks out over time, and eventually your data is gone. This is the problem Samsung ran into with their EVO 840 drives. They manufactured those flash cells using a smaller lithography than the 830. When you shrink the cells down, the volume decreases as the cube, but the surface area decreases only as the square. So the amount of stored charge decreased a lot more than the surface area it could leak out. And as a result, the drives were losing data in less than a year.
Samsung's eventual fix was to update the firmware to make it rewrite the data (refreshing the charge in the cell) more frequently. But that's only possible if the drive is powered on regularly.
USB flash drives seem to made with lower grade flash, which is actually a good thing in this context. Lower grade usually means a larger lithography, which makes it more resistant to this type of data degradation. I've personally had USB flash drives retain data for at least 6 years, and have seen reports of them lasting over 10 years. But just because of how they work, I would not trust them for any sort of long-term data backup. If you're going to make a backup, toss it in the drawer, and forget about it for 5+ years, go with magnetic (good for decades), optical (good for 10-20 years, or centuries for M-Disc), or cloud storage (good as long as the cloud storage company keeps its equipment updated).
You answered all the questions that I had and answered some that I didn't know I needed to ask.
The Cloud, while excellent for storing and sharing data, cannot be used in a lot of different ways.
Simple google result would give you millions of pages of thoughts
Lexar makes horrible usb drives
that crap will fail within 6 months and boom all your stuff is GONE
Great for that to save my azz esp. how buggy recent Win 10 patches have become.
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Great for that to save my azz esp. how buggy recent Win 10 patches have become.
Sputnik. Free backup to FSB servers.
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