Lexar Jump Drives

[wartload 0]

Anyone ever had one of these just go bug-f*** on them? Very odd ... the public annex is fine, but the password-protected area lost all visible content that was there, and instead a bunch of 0-Byte files appeared with random numbers and characters for names. Properties shows that the amount of content that's there is still pretty much correct for the space that had been taken up before.

[billvon 3,111]

Most solid state mass storage devices (i.e. SD cards, USB drives, CF cards etc) are NAND FLASH based. NAND FLASH is inherently unreliable; it loses data over time. Usually it's not noticeable and/or you only lose a few pixels of a picture or a few samples in a song. But operating systems often will not tolerate the loss of a few bits, especially if it's someplace important (like the FAT.)

[mdrejhon 8]

I use a PQI USB stick -- it's less than one quarter the size of a standard jump drive, and less than the thickness of two credit cards. So it easily fits behind my driver's license in my wallet with only a bulge similiar to slipping a credit card or two behind it. It uses a special connector that's smaller than a USB connector but fits in a regular USB jack. Essentially a jacketless regular USB connector. It's totally sealed so the card is water resistant (even more resistant than a SD card).

I have never lost data on a memory card before (yet) -- not even when one of my cards was exposed to water and went through the laundry machine.

It's true that flash degrades over time. Normally, good modern flash memory recover very well by using error correction techniques and moving data around to avoid bad memory. It's a shame to hear that the software behind the secure part wasn't resistant to such degradation. But cheap stuff don't always have that well-designed resistance to errors.

If the content is still there, is it possible that some drivers got messed up? I've heard of this happening before. Another possibility is that power shut off while data was being written to the jump drive or the jump drive got removed too quickly after you finished copying files. (Some computers use write caching on jump drives, which means you must wait a few moments before removing -- or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del once to flush the disk cache)

[nerd137 0]

I've gone through like 3 of them. Finally just stopped using them. I think the problem was that I like the idea of having one on my key chain...but I tend to toss my keys around, drop them, leave them in hot cars during the summer. I guess those drives aren't quite as rugged as they sometimes purport to be.