Re: [PLUG] "Pen Drive" recommendations?

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 10:28  PM, eric@lucii.org wrote:
> I'm considering buying a "pen drive" (USB - Flash Memory -
> portable) to transport some small files around (including my
> gpg key ring(s)).
>
> I run (on various computers), RH 9, SuSE 7.3 and 8.0, and
> they all seem to support USB just fine.  Anybody have any
> recommendations +/- ?   Horror stories?  Success stories?

I believe that the biggest danger from the "flash" drives is the fact 
that they (still) have a very finite number of write cycles.

Amd defines Endurance: "is a measure of the number of programming/erase 
cycles that a Flash memory array can achieve while retaining data 
integrity. This should not be confused with the number of times that a 
system could program a byte in the Flash device. 100,000 minimums 
guaranteed endurance cycles is the current industry requirement."

While it says it should not be confused with... it doesn't say what it 
means, and they don't provide any "read-write" cycle information 
on-line, you have to request it.

And while 100,000 sounds like a lot... it is a "new" number. Very 
recently, 1,000 was a standard number of cycles. (From what I can tell, 
the AMD 100,000 number is talking about one of their new products, 
MirrorBit, announced this time last year.)

At any rate, I've been told that Flash Memory simply "Fails" when it 
"expires." No warnings and no recovery. Which is to say, using that for 
your key ring might be a dangerous thing to do in the longer term. 
Other than that, they seem to work pretty well, if "slow."

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg
# PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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