USB Flash Drives

From TSG Library of Knowledge

A USB flash drive (also known as thumb drives is a portable memory device for storing and transferring files. They are usually 1-3 inches in length, which makes them easily carried, and the storage capacity varies from 128 MB to 32 GB.

Flash drives (or removable disks in general) are notorious for corrupting, particularly when improperly removed from the computer. In order to prevent this, never remove a flash drive while its LED is flashing and always use the Safely Remove Hardware feature by clicking the relevant icon in the task bar. It can also be helpful to format a flash drive with a journalling file system such as NTFS rather than the FAT32 default, although this may slow down writing to them. Because of this tendency (and the ease with which the small drives can be lost) Flash Drives should be used as a file transfer medium and not for permanent storage. In particular it is unwise to trust a Flash Disk as your only backup medium.

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