[Ham-Computers] Flash Drive Selection

[Jim Hill]

I'm looking for two 8 GB flash drives and would appreciate any 
opinions.  Reliability is very important, and speed nice, as  I'll 
use them to save emails.  I currently have two 4 GB drives which are 
used alternately every few days, so if I have a failure I still have 
fairly recent data available. I have had no problems with them, but 
they are almost full.  I attempt to touch metal first when inserting 
the drive, and use the Safely Remove Hardware feature on the system 
tray before removing the drive.

I'm running XP Pro with current updates.

I've purchased 10 flash drives over many years, and have had perfect 
reliability from 9.  The 10th, a  4 GB PNY Attache, failed while 
consolidating my documents, a really inconvenient time.  Actually, it 
was a partial failure that seemed to affect recent documents while 
others not accessed for a long time seemed to be ok.  I've used many 
Word repair programs and have been fairly successful, except for 
table structure (words remain, without the table).  I don't know if 
the problem was really a drive problem or cockpit error.

Pricing seems to be really variable between drive manufacturers, and 
different retailers for the same manufacturer.  So far, I've checked 
Newegg and Amazon.com.  Both have good pricing and also ratings from 
purchasers.

Newegg lists a Tanscend JetFlash V10.....Model TS8GJFV10.  Going 
through the 3-ball comments 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820208094&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&SelectedRating=4&PurchaseMark=&VideoOnlyMark=False&Page=
Author "NTFS", who rates his tech ability as "high", says

Pros: Large capacity.

Cons: As other stated - very slow for small files. It sucked.


Other Thoughts: While the Windows Disk Management tool will only 
allow a FAT32 format you can format this drive NTFS from the command 
prompt, (where the real power is). It may take 4-5 minutes to create 
the file structure but it will make small file transfers very fast. I 
am running XP pro, SP2. (Use at your own risk - volume "E" was the 
8GB flash drive): C:\WINNT\system32>format E: /FS:NTFS Insert new 
disk for drive E: and press ENTER when ready... The type of the file 
system is FAT32. The new file system is NTFS. Verifying 7871M Volume 
label (ENTER for none)? USB Drive Creating file system structures. 
Format complete. 8060892 KB total disk space. 8018068 KB are 
available. C:\WINNT\system32>
.................................................................................................................................................................................

Any comments on his suggestion?  I've heard FAT32 should be used on 
external hard drives, but don't know why.

Thanks, Jim