Can anyone suggest a VERY high quality usb stick drive?

lardon

Hello. Can anyone suggest a high quality made usb stick drive brand that lasts at least 80+ years that I can buy? Many that I found at my store only sells sticks made from china. I know high quality products are made from Germany, Japan, or even the USA. But not many brands are made from those great countires. I know storage media doesn't last forever, but its possible to make them last a long time. :?

BlueSun

Just because it's made in Japan doesn't mean it's automatically flawless and guaranteed to last forever.

http://www.corsair.com/en/usb-drive/fla ... rives.html

Not made in japan, but would probably last for a while.

What do you plan to do with it? Do you plan to be using it for the entire 80 years (unlikely) or do you plan to use this as part of some kind of time capsule?

lardon

I plan to keep it as a backup storage media of my files on a pc and mac.. Because I own more than one pc, I need to keep a regular pace of backing up files. My pcs are already more than 5 years old, and they are aging very quickly. I cannot afford to lose my data. Although I can use cloud backup, this worries me of privacy issues and usage of internet bandwidth (Trust me, my backup is more than 15 GB). I take great care of my usb drives, putting them in a safe place and not exposing them to hostile environments. I don't use often, but I want to ensure my backup is safe; anything can happen and storage media are fragile and fails easily if not taken care of. That is why I keep a good practice of putting backup on safe storage devices.

DeepFriedCookies

Uuuuuuuh.. *hands you an old PNY POS I've had for like 6 years that I bought at wal mart* This should last you a while.. I mean, like, it works fun..

Lol seriously, you should know by now that all storage is fickle, and is never permanent. You can also buy one card that lasts 50 years, and another card of the same module that lasts 3. It's just how drives are, and how storage works. So just keep more than one backup, and every few years, replace your oldest backup drive. And also- go solid state if you're THAT afraid of losing your data.

BlueSun

Well, if this is for backup purposes, then I wouldn't go with a flash drive. I mean, you can use one as one of your backups, but personally I'd go with an external hard drive. Possibly even look at enclosures with multiple drives for redundancy.

If you're really concerned about backups failing, just make sure to backup to multiple places. For example, get both a flash drive and an external hard drive, backup to both and store one off them off site, for instance in a safe deposit box at the bank.

lardon

Alright. This pretty much answers my question. But I have one more question; which file system is the most reliable for storing backup files on an external hard drive: Ext4, FAT32, NTFS, or even HFS+? Or does it even matter at all?

Kirk

lardon wrote:

Alright. This pretty much answers my question. But I have one more question; which file system is the most reliable for storing backup files on an external hard drive: Ext4, FAT32, NTFS, or even HFS+? Or does it even matter at all?

Personally, I prefer to use ext3 on volumes I need to be able to trust. It's older, but it's tried and tested, and there are tons of existing tools for data recovery if that should ever be necessary. I would not use FAT32 as that's not a journaling filesystem. Journaling filesystems will be better in the longrun for data reliability.

DeepFriedCookies

I use NTFS on all of my drives, except Linux home folders and Mac boot drives. What could possibly go wrong?

stitch

There is absolutely no flash drive out there that will last you 80 years, end of. NAND flash cells die out with time and you should idealy be replacing that drive every 4-5 years or so, if not for space concerns alone. As long as you *never* pull out the drive without doing a proper unmount/eject hardware you will be fine with a non-journaled FS like FAT32 or exFAT. The filesystem you choose really will depend on your OS needs (Windows, OS X, Linux?):

FAT32: Solid across the board support-wise in all 3 OSes but there's the 4GB size limitation.
exFAT: Supported on Windows XP SP3+ and OS X 10.6+, free drivers still shit on Linux. 512TB max volume size.
NTFS: OS X and Linux write support buggy with NTFS-3G, overhead from journaling and permissions/metadata that you won't need on a recovery system/fresh install.
extX: OS X support non-existent, buggy IFS driver for Windows. Overhead as with NTFS.
HFS+: ew. why does apple still use this?

lardon

Alright, thanks for all of the information. I'll go on from all of your suggestions you provided me.

DeepFriedCookies

@Stich on HFS+ Resource forks, compatibility, and the fact that they're afraid of change. Seriously, look how long they used cooperative multitasking. Look how long they had 68k code in the Mac OS, and even worse, look how many out of date kexts were included with Leopard and Snow Leopard. SL even had some PowerPC kexts included with it.. They're finally removed all legacy drivers from Lion and Mountain Lion, but still, Apple is hanging on to an old FS. That said I still use it, because it's the default FS OS X will format to, aaaaand I don't know how well Chameleon takes to booting off of anythin else.

But, my question, why is there no decent ext driver for Windows or MacOS X? I can see it being difficult to make one for Windows, seeing it's a very closed OS, especially with file system drivers.. and to add to that, I'm pretty sure there's not an easy way to use FUSE on it either. (Correct me if I'm wrong) But on OS X, it's a Unix based system, and there is FUSE support. Why is it still buggy, when EXT is an open file system?

nightice

Because file systems are complicated.

DeepFriedCookies

But still, there's an HFS (read only) driver for Linux and a R/W HFS driver for Windows.. why haven't someone coded an ext* driver with read write support for OS X or Windows? HFS isn't even an open file system.. ext*'s main selling point is that it's open source.

BlueSun

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

But still, there's an HFS (read only) driver for Linux and a R/W HFS driver for Windows.. why haven't someone coded an ext* driver with read write support for OS X or Windows? HFS isn't even an open file system.. ext*'s main selling point is that it's open source.

There are ext3 / 4 drivers for Windows... I can't remember what it's called, but I use it on my laptop so I can read / write to my Linux partition. It mounts as a normal drive in My Computer.

DeepFriedCookies

I need it. The only thing I found was this really, REALLY horrible ext2 driver that's as old as my mom and while claims compatibility with ext3 and 4, just without journaling- it's lying and won't even attempt to mount them.

Kirk

EXT drivers for Windows...
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/08/access-e ... ns-in.html

DeepFriedCookies

Definitely trying that later. Thanks for the link.

Josh

Excuse me for chiming in here, but aren't situations like this the reason SAMBA exists?

Kirk

Josh wrote:

Excuse me for chiming in here, but aren't situations like this the reason SAMBA exists?

Not if you have a Linux and Windows partition on dual booting machines...

Josh

Yeah I really never run into an issue like that. Most of the media that I need to share is backed up to the cloud.

BlueSun

Kirk wrote:

EXT drivers for Windows...
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/08/access-e ... ns-in.html

Yup, that's what I have on my laptop. It works rather well, I haven't had any issues with it.

CoreDuo

A little bit late but throwing another recommendation out there, the Sandisk Extreme USB flash drive.

Comes in 16, 32, and 64GB capacities, relatively cheap (under $1/GB), limited lifetime warranty, and the fastest on the market.

Benchmark from my own 32GB version with a USB 3.0 port.

Sequential Read: 196.418 MB/s
Sequential Write: 118.846 MB/s
Random Read 512KB: 139.489 MB/s
Random Write 512KB: 19.163 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1): 11.006 MB/s [  2687.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1): 9.769 MB/s [  2384.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32): 9.672 MB/s [  2361.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32): 3.645 MB/s [   890.0 IOPS]

As is typical of NAND flash, write speeds on the 16GB version are about half the 32GB (~55 MB/s) and the 64GB version has write speeds that are around double the 32GB version (~200 MB/s). Read speeds between the different models should be roughly the same.

lardon

CoreDuo wrote:

A little bit late but throwing another recommendation out there, the Sandisk Extreme USB flash drive.

Comes in 16, 32, and 64GB capacities, relatively cheap (under $1/GB), limited lifetime warranty, and the fastest on the market.

Benchmark from my own 32GB version with a USB 3.0 port.

Sequential Read: 196.418 MB/s
Sequential Write: 118.846 MB/s
Random Read 512KB: 139.489 MB/s
Random Write 512KB: 19.163 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1): 11.006 MB/s [  2687.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1): 9.769 MB/s [  2384.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32): 9.672 MB/s [  2361.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32): 3.645 MB/s [   890.0 IOPS]

As is typical of NAND flash, write speeds on the 16GB version are about half the 32GB (~55 MB/s) and the 64GB version has write speeds that are around double the 32GB version (~200 MB/s). Read speeds between the different models should be roughly the same.

I do have a SanDisk usb stick drive. However, it's only the CruzGlider 32 GB version. Unfortunately, those are made in China; I wonder why RadioShack sold it for only $20 when it's on sale?

DeepFriedCookies

Flash drives are made without any kind of human contact. They're completely designed by machine- there's no difference whether it's Chinese, Japanese, or American made. Now, entire computers, that's a whole different subject. The price difference, if any, is because CoreDuo's is a USB 3.0 version.

lardon

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

Flash drives are made without any kind of human contact. They're completely designed by machine- there's no difference whether it's Chinese, Japanese, or American made. Now, entire computers, that's a whole different subject. The price difference, if any, is because CoreDuo's is a USB 3.0 version.

So basically, computers are machine and hand made?

DeepFriedCookies

Now you're getting it. Machines do all of the hard work, like make the chips, and solder them to the PCB, humans simply put the systems together. The first half could happen on the moon, and still be either a decent or horrible product.