Flash memory on a USB stick is easy enough to understand concerning the way it works. The memory is a type of EEPROM and non-volatile, which is the reason it doesn’t require a battery or external power source to retain the information stored on it.

But if you ever asked the question, "Is there a difference between brands?", the answer is yes and no.

Concerning data reliability, all USB sticks are roughly the same. It is very rare that one would absolutely fail on you unless put it through several hundred thousand erase cycles. Some can even go up to a million.

Concerning construction, yes there are differences. Some sticks have a poor casing, causing them to fall apart prematurely. It doesn’t happen often but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Concerning data transfer rate, this is where the biggest differences lie. Some sticks are legitimately slow.

Sandisk (which everybody has owned at one point or another, I have 3 of them,) routinely has the slowest transfer speeds. Reliable, yes, but slow.

Patriot on the other hand routinely has the highest transfer rate. In particular, the Patriot Xporter series. You will pay more for these, but you will also get faster transfers, both for average and burst rate. The customer ratings speak for themselves on Patriot flash memory products.

(And if you happen to have $300+ that you want to spend, Patriot has a Magnum stick that boasts super-high speeds and has 128GB of storage. Yes, 128GB. That’s not a typo.)

Do transfer rates matter?

This all depends on how you use your USB stick.

If using the stick for:

• Bootable biz-card sized Linux
• Routinely transferring files over 25MB in size
• Routinely transferring large amounts of data

..then you will legitimately need a fast-transfer USB stick.

If using the stick for:

• Photos
• Documents
• MP3s
• Smaller files

..then a faster stick won’t really matter unless you’re transferring many small files equaling a large amount of data.

What’s your favorite (or least favorite) brand of Flash memory?

Sandisk, A-Data, Corsair, Advent, Lexar, etc.? Which do you use? Does it live up to expectation or "act weird" periodically?

When most people think of apps that run from the USB stick alone, they think of PortableApps. However there is another choice, and it’s called LiberKey.

I will admit up front that this doesn’t look as good as PortableApps does, however I will say it runs faster and is easier to get to the apps you want quicker.

The first notable difference is that there are categories for apps, which PA doesn’t have (or if there is, I didn’t find that feature).

Secondly you can create both categories and groups. A quick right-click anywhere in LiberKey shows these options:

I even appreciate the fact you can add separator lines, too.

Like PA, there are different installations you can download. I chose to go with the largest, that being "Ultimate". It is jam-packed with apps. Lots of them. It will take time to go thru them all to see what you get.

In addition there are plenty more besides that. I honestly had no clue you could stuff this many apps on a USB stick – even for video editing.

As said above, LiberKey doesn’t exactly look good but wow does it perform well.

LiberKey doesn’t have to be installed to a stick. You could easily push it to CD or DVD instead and run it that way alternatively.

Something interesting to think about is how long data will last, because as everyone knows, nothing is forever.

Here’s a rundown on how long you can expect the media you use to last.

"Media" defined: Data storage on something physical that you own, be it hard disk, optical, flash or tape. I don’t list floppy diskettes because nobody uses those anymore.

Assumptions:

• You are using the media a minimum once per week and when not in use is disconnected and/or unpowered from the electronic mechanism it uses to write data to and stored (ex: you take the DVD out of the drive, put it in a case and store it).
• You are physically storing your media in a dry place at room temperature (72° F / 22° C).

Hard Disk

A production-use hard disk usually has a life span of 3 to 5 years. Some last longer, but trust me there is a reason why most hard drive manufacturers usually do not have hardware warranties that go beyond 5 years.

A hard disk used for backup purposes lasts longer because it isn’t used as often. You can assume the HDD will last at least 7 years. But bear in mind that is an assumption.

As a short-term backup solution, hard disks are a good choice. As a long-term solution, not so much given their relatively short life span.

For more information, this really old (but still relevant) post from our own PCMech forums will give you tons of useful info concerning the life span of a hard disk drive.

Optical

Optical media that you use is CD, DVD, the now-defunct HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Assuming you have a decent CD/DVD burner drive, the life span of optical media almost exclusively depends on how well the disc was made.

Premium-grade media can easily last 10 years. And no, you won’t find it at Wal-Mart. The best possible writable CD/DVD media you can buy is manufactured by Taiyo Yuden. A Google search will reveal where to get some if so inclined. It is lauded as the best of the best. That’s because it is. And yes, you’ll pay good money for it too.

For the rest of us, there’s name brand and generic optical media. You can expect name brand (Memorex, Verbatim, etc.) to last about 5 years. Some of you out there will get 7 to 10 but I personally wouldn’t put that much faith into this type of media.

Concerning generic, the plastic may separate from the aluminum in less than a year. Not a good choice.

With optical media, yes, you get what you pay for concerning life span. No question.

Tip: It is better to store optical discs in jewel cases instead of books. Natural problems (like pages of discs sticking to each other from sitting there too long) can happen with those fold-out books.

Flash

It has been speculated that flash based media, such as a USB stick, will last 8 to 10 years easily. This is because there are no moving parts, the heat it generates is minimal and the way it connects and disconnects to a computer is nearly impossible to get wrong (and therefore almost impossible to break).

What most people will encounter with a USB stick in the future is expiring the amount of times data can be written to it or erased before age-related failure. Most USB sticks will allow one million write and/or erase cycles before it cannot be used any longer.

If a USB stick is used as backup media where it is only used once a week, it is highly unlikely you will ever tap that limit.

But the limit age-wise for data retention is stated to be 10 years and no longer at present.

Tip: You might want to use a label-maker and mark the stick with a date 9 years from now (this gives you enough buffer of time from date of manufacture). Who knows? You might still have it then. And you’ll know the stick will soon fail when the date marked is reached.

If you’re thinking, "How can I be sure USB will even be around in nine years?" It will be. Even if it is replaced by another technology, you will still be able to access the data on it somehow.

Think of it this way: Right now nobody uses floppy diskettes any longer, yet you can still buy a floppy diskette drive and disks easily. At worst, USB flash drives will end up like that. Woefully obsolete, but still accessible.

Tape

This is probably going to surprise a few of you, but premium grade tape backup can last 50 years. Sound ridiculous? It’s not. This method of backup is usually only used by large enterprise and government IT centers.

Tape is one of those things that is about as old-school as you can get when it comes to data storage. True, the technology has advanced, the cartridges are built better and the media can store much more and is more reliable, but the method of the way it works is still essentially unchanged.

Tape media is still readily available, but for those looking for the "big guns", what you would want is certified 30-year tape media. The one notch after that is the premium 50-year. Yes, it’s overkill for most people (and wickedly expensive), but if you want something that lasts longer than anything else, tape is basically your only option.

For those who think tape backup is dead as a doorknob, I beg to differ. Maybe it’s dead as a consumer option, but in enterprise it’s still widely used. Maybe you’re not enterprise, but you can use it. In fact, tape is still the best bang for the buck long-term storage media there is.

If you think tape may be right for you, here are a few things you should be aware of:

First, tape decks do require cleaning. The way to clean is with a tape head cleaner cartridge. The heads will need to be cleaned periodically to ensure proper data writes.

Second, transfer speeds are defined differently but you can assume they’re going to be on the slower side. No, they are not molasses-slow as tape drives were years ago because we’ve got USB connectivity now, but it is true they’re not lightning quick, nor have they ever been.

Third, tape is very particular to format. There’s DLT, SDLT, 1/2-inch, LTO, 4mm, 8mm and so on. When shopping around for a deck, pay strict attention to format and how easy (or not easy) it is to acquire media for it.

Will there ever be a long-term backup solution better than tape?

The only media I know of that could potentially outlast tape is the internet itself. But obviously the internet is not physical media. In fact it’s not even physical. The storage of the internet is termed as putting data "in the cloud". However there are more than a few out there that would rather have media stored safely in a closet or attic rather than on some distant server run by someone else.

Chances are you’re more comfortable with the "un-clouded" way.

What’s the most convenient solution right now?

Tape may be the longest lasting, but USB sticks are the most convenient.

You can most likely fit every digital photo you’ve ever taken on a 4GB stick. And that’s under $15 to acquire.

You can most likely fit every email you have on a 2GB stick. And those are under $10.

As long as you remember to swap the sticks out once every 8 to 10 years, you’re in good shape.

That is unless you leave one in your pants pocket and run it thru a wash cycle while doing the laundry.

What do you use for backup media?

Do you use CD/DVDs? USB sticks? Tape? The internet itself? A combination?

Let us know by writing a comment.

When formatting a USB stick in Windows (something many of us do from time to time), in XP you usually only have two file system options, FAT or FAT32. "FAT", by the way, means "File Allocation Table".

If you were wondering which to pick, the answer is FAT32 because it overcomes certain limitations of FAT.

However if you have a USB stick that’s over 4GB in size, you may want to consider formatting with NTFS instead.

The reason? FAT32 can only recognize a maximum individual file size of 4GB (or to be exactly specific, 4GiB minus 1 byte). If a single file is any larger than that, FAT32 won’t "understand" it and you’ll get an error on attempt to copy that big file over.

For those wondering "What file could possibly be that large?" Video and ISO disc images (such as some big-big Linux distros) can easily go over 4GB in size – and yes, some people will push these files to USB sticks if they have the space. Why not, right?

In XP (but not Windows 2000), the problem that presents itself is that if you have a USB stick that holds over 4GB of data, how do you format it using NTFS instead of FAT32?

One way to do it is via the Device Manager.

1. Go to Control Panel.
2. Double-Click System icon.
3. From the window that appears, click the Hardware tab.
4. Click the Device Manager button.

Under "Disk Drives", if the USB stick is plugged into your computer, it will show up under there, like this:

What we need to do here is change the policy to "Performance" instead of "Quick Removal".

The way we do this is by right-clicking the USB drive listing, selecting Properties and then from the window that appears select the Policies tab.

It looks like this:

Click Optimize for performance and click OK.

Go to format your USB stick (you will have  to format it), and…

Success! Now we have the NTFS option!

DRAWBACK:

Yes there is a drawback to this and a rather large one.

When you have your USB stick set up in this mode, you absolutely must use the "Safely Remove Hardware" method before disconnecting the stick from the computer and you absolutely CANNOT forget to do this. If you do, the data is sure to get corrupted in short order.

If you can deal with that "Safely remove" stuff, go ahead with an NTFS file system on a USB stick larger than 4GB so you can write bigger-than-4GB files to it.

And remember, there’s no need to do this unless you specifically intend to push 4GB+ files on a USB stick.

In previous articles and videos I’ve discussed how to get a "Live" mode (i.e. as if your computer were booting from CD) of Linux on a USB stick. Some people think this is cool but would rather have a full CD-sized distribution installation instead. And when I said "CD-sized" I’m referring to distributions that take up the entire contents of a CD (such as Ubuntu) and not "biz card" distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

To do this it isn’t dependent on the distribution you’re using (you can use any you like) but more so on your USB stick itself.

Consider it this way: You want to use your USB stick as a "hard drive", so to speak. Being that’s the case, you need a stick that exceeds the minimum requirements for the OS to work.

Using Ubuntu as an example, the minimum requirement according to its native installer is a drive that has at least 2048MB free. A 2GB USB stick isn’t enough because it doesn’t have enough minimum space – so you need a 4GB USB stick.

Side note: Think a 4GB USB stick is expensive? It’s isn’t. It’s 8 bucks. And I remember not more than 3 to 4 months ago they were $22. These things are getting so unbelievably cheap it’s ridiculous – and they all work.

My recommended method for installing a full Linux distro on a 4GB USB stick

Before continuing, yes the way I do it is complete overkill – but I like to have absolute 100% confirmation that the Linux install absolutely positively will not touch the internal hard drive of my system. You’ll understand what I mean by that in a moment.

1. Head into the BIOS of your computer and from the boot device order set the first to be CDROM and the second to be USB-FDD, USB-HDD or USB-CDROM.

If USB-FDD doesn’t work for a boot device, try USB-HDD. If USB-HDD doesn’t work, try USB-CDROM. One of them will eventually work. And if not, try plugging the USB stick directly into the back of the computer (as in use the USB ports that are directly off the motherboard and not the ones wired to the front of the case).

2. Power off your computer, open the case and physically disconnect the hard drive from the motherboard.

This is the overkill part. Not entirely necessary, but I don’t want GRUB to even know the internal hard drive exists – because even if you set the hard drive "not to exist" in your BIOS, the Linux installation will still "see" your internal hard drive on most motherboards. I go the extra mile by cracking open the case and unplugging the SATA connector from the motherboard physically.

Before rebooting the computer:

Pop in your Linux distro CD-ROM into the tray because you’ll need to boot from it to install the OS to the USB stick.

Insert the USB stick you want to install the OS to into one of your open USB ports.

3. Reboot and proceed with a normal Linux distro installation.

If all goes well, your computer will boot up, spin up the CD-ROM and launch Linux in a Live mode. From there you proceed with a normal installation. Being your hard drive is physically disconnected the OS will be forced to pick the USB stick as its only means of media to install the OS to.

When done, the OS will prompt you to eject the disc (which you do), then restart the computer.

4. Reboot and test the Linux OS off the USB stick to make sure everything works okay.

On reboot you should have a full Linux OS ready-to-rock. If so, you’re all done with that.

5. Shut down, power off the computer and reconnect the internal hard drive to the motherboard.

Once the USB stick has a full Linux OS on it you’re safe to reconnect your hard drive back to the motherboard.

6. Do a test boot with the USB stick inserted to see if it loads first before the internal hard drive does.

Your boot order should be CDROM, USB-FDD (or HDD or CDROM) then HDD. So what your computer should do is try to boot from the optical drive first, then the USB stick and then the internal hard drive.

If all goes well, whenever the USB stick is plugged into the computer and booted from a "cold start", it will always boot from the USB stick first whenever you want to go into Linux. When done you log out of Linux, shut down, power off, unplug the stick and reboot again to go back to the internal hard drive’s OS.

Final notes

You should bear in mind that by installing a Linux OS on a USB fashion it will not be portable. What this means is that the OS will set itself to use the computer it is first booted from and configure itself as such.

If you take the USB stick after a full install and boot, then bring it to another computer with different hardware and boot from that, chances are high that the internal settings of the OS on that stick will get all messed up because it’s "expecting" a different the computer it was first booted from. Sure, you can simply reconfigure everything and get it working again relatively quickly for anything messed up, but that’s a bit of a hassle.

For each computer you want to boot a full-install-on-USB-stick distro from, it’s recommended you get a separate USB stick dedicated to each computer. The sticks are cheap enough anyway so it’s not a big deal.

This is a follow-up article to this one showing how simple it is to use Unetbootin to install a Linux distribution to your USB stick. Bear in mind that Unetbootin has the choice of many different distros to choose from. Even if you have only have an older 128MB stick, you still could use Damn Small Linux on it! See video below for details.

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one.

I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.

1. It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space).
2. I wanted to try out a "full" Linux distribution booted off USB installed via UNetbootin.

Last week I tried this out with smaller distros, but now that I had a full 2GB at my disposal I could try the CD-sized distributions. So of course I installed Linux Mint "live" mode on the stick and gave it a go.

Here’s what I have to report:

Now that I’ve experienced what it’s like to run a CD-sized distro off a USB stick, I can honestly say that this beats the ever-lovin’ crap out of using an optical disc. It is faster and smoother all around in operation, and quiet. No annoying spin-up/spin-down noises whatsoever.

If given the option I will always use this method of booting a live Linux distro over using the disc. No question. I highly recommend that if your computer has the ability to boot off USB, are curious about Linux and hate running anything off the optical drive, use this method.

Side note about UNetbootin: If you’re asking "can I make my USB an emergency bootable repair tool?" Absolutely. It supports NTPasswd, FreeDOS, Smart Boot Manager and several others. Like I said, if you can boot off USB, use the stick instead. See the UNetbootin web site for details on that.

Sick of burning CDs of Linux distributions every time you want to try out a new one? Don’t worry, you can reuse your USB stick as many times as you like and burn bootable ISOs to it. Is there an easy way to do this? Yes.

It’s actually pretty easy. But before I tell you how there’s a small list of things you need to do first:

1. You need a USB stick that you don’t mind erasing all the data off of so you can put a distro of *nix on it.
2. The computer you do this on must be physically connected to the router, i.e. no wireless here. Must be wired. Granted, some *nix distros come with decent wireless support, but better safe than sorry here. Configure the wireless later.
3. The computer you do this on must be able to boot from USB. Being that the vast majority of computers can do this it shouldn’t be a problem. Just head into the BIOS, look at the boot device order and make sure USB is before HDD and you’re good to go.

A utility that you can use to create a bootable Ubuntu NetInstall image on a USB stick is UNetbootin. This is available as a Windows app or a Linux app.

In my particular situation I only had a 512MB USB stick at my disposal but wanted to install Ubuntu 8.10. Not a problem because Ubuntu has a "NetInstall" version so you don’t need a USB stick with large space (you could even get away with a 128MB).

I downloaded UNetbootin and ran it. This is what I did:

Above: I select the distribution as Ubuntu and the second drop-down menu as the 8.10_NetInstall because that’s the one I know will fit on the little 512MB USB stick. At the bottom the USB Drive is selected so that’s where the image will be written to.

Above: UNetbootin is retrieving the image from the internet to push to the USB stick.

Above: UNetbootin has completed the image install to the USB stick. Now I have a USB-loaded version of Ubuntu 8.10 NetInstall ready to rock. I clicked Exit to close the problem.

Notes before continuing: UNetbootin supports a ton of different *nix distros, including a few BSDs! You don’t have to use Ubuntu if you don’t want to. You could use Linux Mint or Fedora for example. But it should be noted that Ubuntu (aside from the "biz-card" ones like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux) is the only one that has a NetInstall feature. This is the reason I chose it to begin with. I wanted a full distro without the size because the stick couldn’t hold it. Ubuntu was the one.

At this point you do the following:

1. On the destination computer, make sure it’s wired into the router for internet connectivity.
2. Insert the USB stick into the destination computer.
3. Boot it.

If all goes well, the PC will boot from the stick, automatically acquire network connectivity and then ask you a series of simple questions (i.e. what keyboard layout do you want, etc.).

From there the base Ubuntu will be installed with no GUI.

After that you will be asked what you want for your Ubuntu. You can do the regular Ubuntu Desktop, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, "Media" version, "Basic Server" or whatever you like. Most likely you’ll just opt for Ubuntu Desktop which is what I did.

Depending on how fast (or moreover slow) your internet connection is, it may take time for the installation to complete. Possibly a really long time. Be patient. It will eventually complete.

If you didn’t use a NetInstall but rather a regular "full" distro, everything will load off the USB stick without issue and you’re good to go.