Do thumb drives wear out?

Thumb drives are one of the most widely used memory storage devices on the market. You may have seen a thumb drive appear on a keychain or with a lanyard. A thumb drive is very small, usually about the size of your thumb which is where the name thumb drive derived. One of the great things about a thumb drive is that it is re-writeable and it can hold a lot of memory without needing an external power source. Compared to many of the external hard drives on the market, a small thumb drive is definitely the way to go to quickly back-up your files for a low-cost.

A thumb drive will fit into any USB port on your computer. It uses a hot swap power source from the computer, which means you can plug it in and wait for the computer to recognize it. You don't need to reboot the computer or do anything special to start using the device.

Many people enjoy the convenience and easy of use that comes with a thumb drive. If you would like to print off a variety of pictures at your local shopping center, you can transfer the files to a thumb drive and take it to the store and plug it into a photo booth where you can order your pictures and have them in seconds. It's a simple way transfer information without needing a large space to hold the files, like you often do when you start burning a lot of CDs.

The downside to a thumb drive is that it will eventually wear out. Most thumb drives are built to last for about 10,000 to 100,000 rewrites. You may think that you will never rewrite the thumb drive that many times, but it happens all the time and before you know it, all the data on the thumb drive can be lost forever.

So why do thumb drives wear out? Well, here's the story behind a thumb drive, or a flash drive as they are commonly called. When you store memory on it the computer will send a signal telling the device to flash it, similar to that of a camera flash. Basically this flah is writing the data so the device remembers it. When you decide to re-write that memory, the computer sends a signal to the device to tell it to erase it where it is again flashed off the device. As this sounds like a simple and easy process, the little thumb drive device can only handle so many flashes. While the package says it can handle 100,000 flashes, it may give out before that time and your data can be lost. This is why you need to know that there is a limit to the thumb drive and why it's important to back-up your data with an external hard drive or purchase multiple thumb drives to back-up your data.

A lot of flash drive manufactures are installing circuitry on the flash drive to prevent corruption of data. While the circuitry may be able to recover some of the data on the device, it cannot guarantee this type of protection for everything on the device. What usually causes a thumb drive to wear out before its expected usage is a bit of bad information. If you are transferring worn out information on the thumb drive, it will corrupt the thumb drive rendering the entire device unreadable.

To prevent thumb drive failures with important information, always back-up your big data on a hard drive and use the thumb drive for the smaller applications and files. Replace your thumb drive every three years. This will allow for about 10 re-writes a day on the device. In a work-related setting, it is easy to re-write the information on a flash drive at least 10 times a say so this number isn't far fetched.