What You Should Know About Flash Drives

Nowadays, we have a variety of flash drives on the market, but which flash drives are more reliable and better? You should decide based on some indicators that affect the durability and functionality of the USB flash drive.

Choose a Flash Drive After Considering These Characteristics

• The number of rewrite cycles. This characteristic is the main indicator of the shelf life of a flash drive. As a rule, this number varies from 10 to 100 thousand times. Each time you add or remove information from a flash drive, this action counts as one time rewriting. So as you can see, ten thousand is not that much, especially for those who use the device several times a day. Also, not all flash drives fulfill the stated number of rewrites. You can find fakes, cheap or low-quality flash drives or flash drives with manufacturing defects. So be careful and try buying a flash drive from a proven manufacturer so you can be sure that quality will be good. Famous brands use proven technologies and high-quality components that directly affect the number of rewriting cycles, i.e. the durability of the flash drive. You can simply buy one of the established and popular models.
• Material of a flash drive. Plastic, rubber or iron material of a flash drive that depends on your personal preferences, under normal conditions plastic is a good recommendation—light and simple material, however, it can overheat and even melt due to poor heat transfer. Besides, some manufacturers make very thin shells. Rubber and iron flash drives are also very good choices—iron is a very sturdy material and rubber is a flexible material, so your flash drives made with these materials are going to last a long time.
• The memory of the flash drive. Memory of a flash drive can reach up to 2 TB. This capacity is enough to store any documents or any multimedia files you have. Such a flash drive can even carry lots of gigabytes of programs and also be used as a hard drive replacement. Of course, you can choose a flash drive with a bigger or smaller capacity, it depends on the needs you have (for storing photos you can use a flash drive with a smaller capacity, if you want to create a bootable flash drive you need much more memory for this).
• The speed of the flash drives. Speed determines how fast USB flash drive reads and writes information. So flash drive speed also divided into some standard: USB 2.0 or 3.0 (3.1 is the newest). USB 3.0—this standard means that a flash drive reads information 2-3 times faster, and writes it 1.5 times faster than its predecessor. Also, the speed depends on the microcircuits used in the device and on the receiving side—the health and relevance of iron.
• The format of the connector. There are USB and micro USB flash drives. The micro USB flash drives are for mobile devices. Their connector size fits into the connector through which you connect your smartphone or tablet to a computer or a charger. Often these flash drives are equipped with a USB-sized output.

Basic Rules for Safe Operation with a USB Drive to Extend the Life of a Flash Drive

• Avoid mechanical damage or water, because these can lead to contact failure or damage to the memory chip. If you are not sure of your accuracy, purchase flash drives in a very sturdy case (metal or other).
• Correctly remove the flash drive from a computer. Do not pull out the flash drive without performing the function "safely remove the flash drive," and do not turn off the PC before removing the flash drive. As a result of incorrect extraction, the file system may be damaged and the PC will require formatting the USB device.
• Do not allow overheating of plastic flash drives and do not insert the device into an overheated PC.
• When viruses are detected, save the data on another device, and format the USB flash drive—this will help avoid malfunctions and its “invisibility” for the computer.
• Experts recommend changing the flash memory every 2-3 years—this is precisely how long the flash drive lives if you use it intensively. Otherwise, at some point, valuable data may not be available anymore, so don't forget about shelf life of a flash drive. You can also read this article for more information about flash drives and how to use them correctly.

Final thoughts

In order to choose the right flash drive you need to take into account all the factors I mentioned above. And also you need to be careful in using your flash drive, then it will serve you for a long time and you will not be faced with damaged flash drives. You can look at this interesting USB flash drives options.