http://www.supermediastore.com/adata-pd9-8gb-usb-flash-drive.html
I’ve been looking around for a flashdrive and found them to be about ten bucks a gig. 4 gig is about the highest capacity drive I’ve found, around forty bucks.
Whadda you think of this one?
I don’t know, but some of the reviews listed on that website are less than enthusiastic:
Yeah, I saw that. That’s the main reason I brought this to the SDMB. Still, the 8 Gig figure still intrigues me.
What are you using it for?
Backup.
You’re using a flash drive for backup?! You might want to try a slightly more permanent medium, or at least spring for a name brand that has a good reputation.
I’ve never used one of their flash drives, but I’ve used SD cards and micro SD cards that were made by A Data, and they’re garbage. Spring for a better name at least.
Rule #1 of Buying Electronics:
If the price looks way too good to be true, it IS too good to be true.
This card is the equivalent of deleting 8GB worth of files and then tossing $25 down the garbage chute… save your money and buy the equivalent from a reputable brand, or settle for a good-quality 2GB drive (which should be under $25 at this stage).
I’d have no problems using it for my walking around drive, but no way would I trust it as my main backup option. But then, I wouldn’t trust any flash drive for my main backup. It looks like a good deal, for taking along copies of pictures from my last trip.
I thought a flashdrive would be better than cd disks, for both speed and relialability. Which is better for backup?
So you are going to load 8 gigs on a flash drive and throw the drive into a drawer? Can you put a lable on it saying what’s there?
Flash drives are not long term storage devices. You want something permanent, like CD/DVD, tape, or another hard drive.
permanent… like another hard drive? You’re kidding, right?
What do you mean? What’s wrong with using a hard drive for backup?
There are many harddrive based backup systems, including Raid-5 setups that offer redundancy. They’re not perfect, but no backup system is.
Assuming you do a write-once to it and stick it in a drawer, I think I’d bet on a hard drive being readable after a decade before I’d bet on a CD. Even if you write to it every week or so, hard drives usually have an astoundingly long life these days. Not counting the boot drive that Vista keeps corrupting (but every other OS can use fine and report no errors with), I haven’t had a drive fail on me in half a decade…and I use a LOT of hard drives.
Of course, with CD’s or DVD’s being dirt cheap, you can do the “Make a jillion of them so that one will still work” method, but the things that break them (heat, light) will likely break lots at once.
Could someone please explain why it’s bad to use flash drives as backup? I’ve considered doing the same thing, and I’m not especially tech-savvy.
Interesting, thanks. Aren’t hard drives equally susceptible to strong magnets though?
I definitely would not – do you still have a IDE interface on your computer? Will you in 10 years? How about SASI? SCSI-1?
I believe the specification was for “permanent” storage, and the flash drive was mocked, and a mechanical, magnetic (and erasure and crash prone) solution was trotted out. Come now.