Pendrives...

[jmcc]

Hi

This thread is for us to share our knowledge about pendrives: personal experience, opinions, which are the best brands and models and all things related to pendrives.

I am specially interested because I want to buy a new one. I have 3 pendrives, all are Kingston:

- 1 GB DataTraveler 2

(source)

- 1 GB DataTraveler mini, migo edition

(source)

- 2 GB DataTraveler 100

(source)

The thing is that a friend bought a 4 GB model, also Kingston branded, some time ago this month, and after a week it just not worked again. I don't know what exactly happened but I want to learn about your experiences and opinions on this matter.

About myself, until now I am happy with my pendrives. Recently, I had a problem with a data cable where I connected one of my pendrives. The cable was damaged with some kind of connection problem: it disconnected from the PC by itself and connected alone frequently.

It was a new USB cable extension and I discovered this problem at that moment. It disconnected the pendrive when it was still mounted and when I was watching a trailer stored on it. Ubuntu (6.10, my OS) send me a message about possible data damage on the pendrive due to a bad unmounting process.

When I connected the pendrive again, it had various files named with strange characters, files that could not be open. Also some folders had this same problem. The entire pendrive mounted itself as a read only unit and on Properties it was stated that there were 19 dot something GB of data stored on an... 1 GB pendrive!

The Ubuntu events register send messages about a bad FAT file system on the pendrive. What I did was to format it but with Windows on the internet café, because I forgot how to do it with Ubuntu.

Fortunatelly, I could copy part of the stored files to the PC (if I have data on a pendrive it's because I can't transfer it to my PC and I have not burned it on DVD-Rs) and I could remember some of the damaged files (so I downloaded them again), but there were files I don't remember what kind of info/data they contained, so I lost those.

After formating the pendrive seems OK. I have put the damaged USB data cable apart to never use it again.

By the way, I have had this same kind of messages frequently when I have my cellphone (Nokia E62)connected to the PC with an USB data cable (not the same cable of the previous case, this cable I know works fine because is the one I always use to transfer the data of my pendrives). But the problem here is that I don't have an original Nokia USB data cable for my phone... And fortunatelly I have not lost any data on the cellphone's 256 MB miniSD card (I will buy an original Nokia USB cable for my phone as soon as possible).

And back to topic... What do you know about this?

Thanks