Flush Flash Drives

Flash-drives seemed like a great alternative/replacement for floppies and disks. However, they seem problematic in a larger office setting. And when they do work, the interface is goofy and/or inconsistent between brands. Other than physically bad disks, I don't remember anywhere near as many problems with floppies.

When were you starting to use floppies? They had many problems in the early days (1980-1990) --PeteHardie

Are we just too new into this technology curve, or is something foul?

The title of this page is misleading. Are we complaining about the methods of using flash drives, or the need to explicitly unmount them before removing them from the USB port?

AmigaOs implemented removable media with grace. The disk caches would automatically flush after five seconds of idleness. So, you could always safely eject a floppy or (by extension) remove a flash volume if said volume hasn't been accessed in the last five seconds plus however long it took to flush anything that was cached. Which was usually pretty quick, and always very obvious. Obviously, extend this to all mounted volumes if you're intending to turn the machine off. None of this mambsey-pambsey "Shutdown" crap.

Removing them gracefully is another issue. Basically, they don't seem to be reliable, at least in terms of plug-and-play.

The only time I've ever had a problem with solid-state devices is when using a SecureDigital? card from my camera. Since the camera formatted it with 7 sectors per cluster on a FAT16 filesystem, Linux would have nothing to do with it until I hacked the kernel to allow non-power-of-two cluster sizes. Then it worked flawlessly. Interestingly, attempting to format the card from Linux worked in such a manner that the camera could only read from, but not write to, the card. It seems the camera's firmware has 7 sector clusters hardwired into its logic.

[They're in constant use where I work, to the point that it's almost unfashionable not to have at least one dangling around your neck. They see abuse no other media can withstand. Occasionally one poops, but at a rate far less frequent than floppies, even at their best. A few manufacturers make versions festooned with installation woes, but the majority just plug-'n'-go.]

Could you by chance mention the problem vendors? Thanks.

[Next time I run across one, I'll make a note of it. I'm sure it's been at least a year since I've seen a troublesome one. My favourite is a Kingston DataTraveler 1gb I've had for a couple of years (see http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Traveler-Flash-DTI-1GB/dp/B000AV14M2), which has been rock solid and works on everything (including my car stereo) without fuss.]

Also be aware that all forms of flash are limited in their write capacity -- disk blocks typically can handle only 10,000 to 100,000 writes. Very nearly all filesystems in use these days are not optimized to work around this limitation. Hence, failures in the media can occur rather frequently. Worse, the more data is on the drive, the faster this will occur, since with fewer free blocks to use, the odds of re-writing a block increases quite a bit!

[Good point. I never work directly on a flash disk -- I always copy on and/or off and then immediately dismount.]

None of the problems I've seen are likely due to too many writes. Most seem to be driver-related and/or the way drive letters are mapped when plugged in. Its possible that if a large company standardizes on desktops and flash-drive brands, such problems are reduced. But our organization has yet to standardize on flash-drive brand. Still, this shouldn't have to be with a commodity technology. Floppies had a lot of media-damage problems, but never driver problems for different floppy brands. (We use a lot of Dell desktops, for good or bad.)

[What OS are you folks running? Is it possible there are security policies interfering with the drives? We mainly run XP, plus the occasional Mac or Linux box. Flash drives from every conceivable manufacturer are in constant use, but I can count on one hand the number of flash drives that either (a) didn't work, or (b) tried to install a gaggle of drivers. Even the latter usually work.]

SeptemberZeroEight