USB Flash Drives

[Pnoahjones]

My friend saved a word document and came back to a new computer and his flash
drive said that the data was lost or corrupt. My question is he said that he
couldnt find the safely remove hardware button at our college computers so he
just pulled it out after saving would that make his USB go bad? What makes a
USB Flash drive go bad? and also as someone in the IT tech Field what do i
tell people to prevent this there USB going bad?

 

[DL]

Flash drive should be only used for copying data from a hard drive to
another location.
Flash Drives can differ in quality

 

[Bob I]

Yes, if he pulled it out while it was being written to. Or the drive
could have just failed. You can't "prevent" a drive from failing, but
you can avoid corrupting it by not removing it while it is being written to.

 

[JoAnn Paules [MVP]]

Did he save it directly to the flash drive (poor practice) or did he save it
to the hard drive then copy it over to the flash drive (preferred method)?

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

My friend saved a word document and came back to a new computer and his flash
drive said that the data was lost or corrupt. My question is he said that he
couldnt find the safely remove hardware button at our college computers so he
just pulled it out after saving would that make his USB go bad? What makes a
USB Flash drive go bad? and also as someone in the IT tech Field what do i
tell people to prevent this there USB going bad?

1) Always save to the local hard drive then COPY the file to removable
drives/flash drives.

2) Conversely, always copy from the removable to the local HDD then open the
files from the HDD.

3) It'd be worth looking into why he couldn't find the remove hardware button,
but at the very least, it'd be wise to wait a few seconds or a minute after
writing to the drive and before removing it.

Finally, the data on the drive may be corrupted but the drive itself probably
hasn't gone bad.

 

[James Silverton]

JoAnn wrote on Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:07:10 -0500:

Did he save it directly to the flash drive (poor practice) or
did he save it to the hard drive then copy it over to the
flash drive (preferred method)?

I'm not disputing your advice, which is doubtless correct, but why?

--

James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not