All flash memory including USB memory stick drives "wear out" after large numbers of writes. These drives are made with internal controllers that check when a "sector" begins to wear out and will relocate the sector to a different portion of the memory space. This is not particularly different from floppy drives or hard disks which can also develop defects in particular sectors and the drive controller and/or the operating system will mark the sector as bad and use a different sector for the information. Often the drives (like floppies and hard disks) will have extra sectors set aside for just this purpose.
Thank You,
At the risk of getting too OT:
Is there more to a 'flash drive' than just the stick?
I.E. I'm about to get a new PC with usb ports on the front.
Can I set 1 of them (from BIOS) as a bootable drive?
It's likely that your new PC would be able to boot from the flash drive.
Check the manual on the BIOS.
I'm not sure what you mean "more to a 'flash drive'". USB devices are
divided into various classes and "mass storage" is one of those that include
hard disks and devices that look like hard drives, like flash drives.
The pic shows the whole 'drive' as opposed to a floppy which inserts into a drive ?
So the usb port is a socket for the drive, rather than the drive itself ?
And if bootable this would mean usb runs from the bios rather than the OS ?
Thanks again [noparse]:)[/noparse] ·
The flash drive does include both the memory itself and a controller. The BIOS would
have enough code in it to initialize the USB and the flash drive and to be able to support
enough basic I/O to read in the boot block which would read in enough of the operating
system for that to get going. Once Windows is operating, it probably doesn't use the
BIOS routines since those are fairly primitive.
People do this all the time. A quick search on google will give you tons of results for Linux distros that are built for booting off of a usb drive. Beware that USB flash devices are much slower than conventional HDs.
The preferred setup seems to be CF (Compact Flash) cards with an IDE converter. This allows the computer to function normally since the CF card appears as a standard hard drive.
You will likely need to tweak the OS you are installing to minimize disk writes on boot. There are lots of instructions on how to do this for Windows / Linux. This will greatly extend the life of your flash device.
hitsware
Posts: 156
Comments
At the risk of getting too OT:
Is there more to a 'flash drive' than just the stick?
I.E. I'm about to get a new PC with usb ports on the front.
Can I set 1 of them (from BIOS) as a bootable drive?
Check the manual on the BIOS.
I'm not sure what you mean "more to a 'flash drive'". USB devices are
divided into various classes and "mass storage" is one of those that include
hard disks and devices that look like hard drives, like flash drives.
The pic shows the whole 'drive' as opposed to a floppy which inserts into a drive ?
So the usb port is a socket for the drive, rather than the drive itself ?
And if bootable this would mean usb runs from the bios rather than the OS ?
Thanks again [noparse]:)[/noparse]
·
have enough code in it to initialize the USB and the flash drive and to be able to support
enough basic I/O to read in the boot block which would read in enough of the operating
system for that to get going. Once Windows is operating, it probably doesn't use the
BIOS routines since those are fairly primitive.
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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support
·
The preferred setup seems to be CF (Compact Flash) cards with an IDE converter. This allows the computer to function normally since the CF card appears as a standard hard drive.
You will likely need to tweak the OS you are installing to minimize disk writes on boot. There are lots of instructions on how to do this for Windows / Linux. This will greatly extend the life of your flash device.
Harrison