Im thinking of getting a 1GB or 2GB Pen Drive for my PC. I have been looking on the Amazon.co.uk at some Pen Drives. I have been using my sisters 128MB Data Bar Pen Drive now and again but it dont seem to hold a lot. I know 128MB is not much. Is it worth me getting a Pen Drive. I have been looking an the Amazon.co.uk at some Pen Drives and the odd 1GB or 2GB pen drives are under £40.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/browse.html?node=10392001

Darren
Last edited by ney : 22-08-2006 at 19:12

Anyone know if its worth my while buying one.

Darren

or you can try play.com as with them postage is free, you can easily buy a 1gb drive under £25.

i find them extremely useful, especially at uni. i have a 512Mb but i wish i got a bigger one now. well worth it, get one so u can attach it to ur keyring too.

I have a 2GB drive, which I use every day moving source code between work and home. It's also useful when visiting customers to be able to grab data from their systems. I don't know how I managed without it.

I will look around and may get a 1GB or 2GB one in the next fews weeks. My sisters one that I sometimes use is only 128MB.

Darren

Yeah, usb drives are really useful, but i always have trouble using them on anything other than xp

You may want to look at this: 2GB USB drive for £17.99

That seems very cheap for a 2GB but it dose look good. I think I may go for a 2GB. A woman at work was using a 512MB pen drive(memory stick as she called it) the day and said it was great but slow once in a while when transfering big files but said its worth getting one and not to go for one under 512MB. She was using it with windows 2000 and trasfaring word documents to an XP PC.

Darren

Cheapest postage is £3.95 with that one. Amazon or Play may have something that works out cheaper.

Whats the difference from a 2GB pen drive at say £17.99 and a 2GB one at £29.99. Dont they do much the same job.

Darren

Well, you'd think so. Many of those pen drives are manufactured by the same place, then get different labels slapped on them.

Have a look at the reviews of that 7dayshop (Samsung) pen drive, it gets a good write up.
Last edited by clh84 : 23-08-2006 at 19:59

When you get a pen drive make sure you back it up on your computer everyday or every other day. I've seen pen drives breaking easily by people taking them out of their machines too quickly or breaking the USB connection inside the port.

They are excellent devices, saves you carrying around numerous discs. I've had a 512MB one for about 3 years now and I can't imagine life without them. I'm going to upgrade to a 2GB one soon.

Just makes you wonder how we survived with floppies carrying a [paltry 1.44 megs!!

USB drives are very useful and very resilient, the Gadget show did a feature on portable storage a while ago, and a USB drive survived being frozen, baked in a cake, driven over and an explosion. (After the last one it did need some work at a data recovery company, but the data survived.)

I have two a 512Mb and 1Gb, the only problem I have with them is that they are easily lost. (I've lost one or two in my time) I have attached key fobs to mine now to make them a bit more noticeable

A friendly word of advice, do not store any sensitive data on one, if it ever got lost it could provide whoever found it (or stole it) with enough info to steal your identity.

I'm starting college tomorrow and having read this I think I might buy one myself. They sound really useful and I might buy a 2Gb.

Is it possible to load an operating system onto one (ie. Win98) and use it instead of a hard drive on an older machine? I think that Win98 SE supported USB.

If you get anything over about 512Mb make sure it's got high speed memory in it, and that it supports USB2. Otherwise you'll die of boredom waiting for it to copy.

Have a look at this guide:
How to Run Linux on a USB Drive

OK, I know that you mentioned Windows and not Linux (and that not everyone likes Linux) so how about Windows CE... Still not good enough? OK, forget Win98 - if you really want Windows on a USB drive why not use XP?

This guide runs though how to create a working Windows XP installation on your USB drive:
Windows In Your Pocket

Finally, if you want to know what else your memory stick can be used for (apart from ferrying data around), have a look at this last link:
List of portable software

I hope this helps... I have a couple of these (1x256mb and 1x1gb) and they always come in handy if you are away from home or are using a machine that you can't install software to.


(Edit)
Sorry for going on, but have a look at this website to compare prices:
My Memory
They are based in Jersey so you can save on VAT and they always seem to have clearance deals...
Last edited by cy_bones : 05-09-2006 at 12:49

Do flash drives have to be kept away from anything, such as mobile phones, speakers or magnets? And can high capacity ones crash on slow computers?

I treat mine like crap and it's never failed yet, touch wood. They get hot, cold, sat on, damp; one even went in a cup of coffee.

But at the end of the day it's an electronic device so you should take sensible precautions.

Yes. I wouldn't advocate dunking it in coffee, running it over with your car or indeed giving it a good clean in your trouser back pocket by sticking it in the washing machine.

The biggest risk is it being incorrectly formatted so it is not recognised by your PC. I have had this happen to 2 drives, they work in some machines but not others. I will get around to formatting them properly one day!

As with all storage devices, make sure you keep a backup of any important data... In general terms though they are very reliable (no moving parts) and should retain data for about 1000 years.

I bought one of those £17.99 ones - they work very well - but the key ring thing broke off after 2 weeks

The main thing is to make sure you 'safely remove hardware' in XP before removing it.

Otherwise there is a chance what you write to it won't actually have been flushed out of the buffers to the memory stick itself

I know 99% of the time you can get away without doing this, if you don;t pull it out right away

But sods law always comes in to play here I find, and when it was most important that I had the data on the stick was the time when I didn't bother to 'stop' it and found it didn't have what i thought/should have had