A patron could not open his flash drive on one of our desktops. He moved to another computer and was successful in opening it. I tried a flash drive in the original computer and it worked. The patron asked "Can flash drives wear out?"
While technology continues to improve, the fact is that flash memory has limited number of times it can be written to. It can, in fact , wear out. Flash memory, the type of memory used in USB thumb-drives and other devices is very cool, but the dark side is that it does wear out. The problem is that memory can be flashed only so many times. When that limit is approached, some portion of the memory may not properly remember what was written to it, go wrong, and cause corruption. It may only take a single bit of information to be wrong or "wear out", for the entire contents of a flash memory chip (including all those photos), to be lost.
Scary, huh?
Jody,
ReplyDeleteI Googled this just to read more on this topic because I've never heard this! I think I came across the same article you cite here and it said you can write/rewrite to a flash drive about 10,000 to 100,000 times. That's years and years -- but I guess backing up important info is the trick -- no matter the technology you're using. Great post! Always learning something....