Mystery characters

October 11, 2006 7:38 PM

What's causing my files to go haywire?

My entire life is on my 2gb usb flash drive. Recently I have started noticing that some of my Word files have screwy characters inserted in them. It's stuff from the extended character set inserted randomly or replacing other characters. Since most of the contents of this drive are Word files, this is the only place I've seen the problem, but it is starting to pop up a lot. I've had this flash drive for about 9 months. Do you think it could be wearing out? (It was a PNY ultra-cheapy.) Or do you think that something else could be the culprit? Differences between the version of Word I use at home (latest release) or work (second to newest release)? What would it look like when a flash drive started to poop out?

posted by Crotalus to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Yep, it's probably wearing out. Flash Drives have a limited life in terms of the number of writes you can do to them. I think mine is about 100,000 from memory, if I recal correctly. After that point, it's not guaranteed that my data won't start going haywire.

I imagine for a cheap drive, that number will be less. Do you run any "portable apps" off the drive, or use it for any purpose that would result in frequent writing and updating of data on the drive? Most portable apps are designed to minimize the writing they do to the drive (for instant, web browsers won't use it for caching), but if you run software from it that isn't intended to be used from a USB drive, you can run through the x'000 writes pretty quickly.
posted by Jimbob at 7:43 PM on October 11, 2006

Best answer: When flash starts to wear out, you'll see random bits becoming unable to accept programming. You'd probably notice this more in recently-written files. Older files will probably be OK until one of those randomly unprogrammable bits turns up in some filesystem-critical block like a directory or FAT block, at which point huge slabs of files will mysteriously disappear.

Back that sucker up to a DVD right now, and get a new one.
posted by flabdablet at 1:26 AM on October 12, 2006