thumb drives

[HLA]

just if anyone is interested, I just upgraded mine, but Best Buy has 4 gig Sandisk thumb drives for $40 and if you use the removal tool you can remove the U3 that is installed on it and get the whole 4 gig on one partition and now it works flawlessly with no autorun.

[Jim2121]

just something to watch for, those Sandisk memory sticks. I own appx 20-25 of them from the 4 pack of 32mb,256mb,128mb -all types up to the 2gig size. cruizer I think is the one's ...anyway I have lost data on appx: 8 of those products. Sandisk will be glad to give you a replacement free. but the data is sometimes gone for good. Its worth the time to back all those sticks up on a Maxtor 300gig. or back them up someplace
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another experience to note

[Rick Rock]

We have a local computer supply store that sells the 2gigs for $16 all day long, no limits, lifetime warranty.
http://microcenter.com/single_product_r ... id=0250132

[Wowbagger]

I have had SEVERAL Sandisk devices - both RS-MMC and SD - die on me. One day they are fine, the next day they are deader than fsck - to the point that putting them into a USB reader either a) causes the reader's firmware to crash, requiring it to be disconnected from USB to reset it, or b) has no effect, the reader doesn't even recognize there was a device inserted.

These devices were NOT constantly being inserted and removed from a device, so ESD is unlikely, nor were they being written to constantly, so exceeding the number of write cycles is also unlikely (and with modern flash devices have over 100K writes per cell, and having embedded wear leveling, the time to exceed the cycle life for a device is VERY large - this isn't like the old Series I flash, a fact that embedded systems designers like me appreciate VERY MUCH.)

I've personally "flipped the bozo bit" on Sandisk - I will not buy their products nor recommend them to others.

Then there's this whole "Let's put a bunch of crap on the disk, and have it auto-run and auto-install on Windows, and NOT let you delete it except with our special little tool, which, by the way, ONLY runs under Windows" BS. If you guys want to pre-load the disk with stuff, fine. If I delete it, THEN I DON'T WANT IT. Don't "helpfully" restore it the next time it gets inserted into a Windows machine - I didn't type "rm -rf /media/memorystick/*" accidentally.

And BTW, Sandisk actually had to work around an aspect of Window's security to make this work (and yes, I actually put "Windows" and "security" into the same sentence without the phrase "complete absence of". It's a rare enough occurrence. Note it on your calendars.). You see, normally WindowsXP will autorun ONLY CDs and DVDs, not floppies or USB mass storage devices, because so many people beat up on Microsoft for the security risks thereof. So now-a-days, by default WinXP will only autorun files located on devices which identify themselves as CDROM/DVDROM devices. You see, at the lowest levels, IDE, USB and Firewire act like they are SCSI devices: they use the same command structures, just a different transport mechanism. Under SCSI, a block device like a disk drive identifies itself as one type of device, while a CDROM identifies itself as a completely different type of device. WinXP will autorun data on the latter, not the former.

So what Sandisk did was to have the Cruzer identify itself as 2 devices - one a block device (the main flash device) and one as a CD device (actually, as a DVD/CDROM writer, of all things!), which contains all their crapware. That way, as far as Windows is concerned the thumb drive is a USB connected CDROM drive, and the data on it is fair game for auto-execution.

Bastards!

And as for buying thumb drives - even with shipping and handling, NewEgg (http://www.newegg.com) has MUCH better prices than any walk-in store I've seen.

[Al]

It's time to stop beating around the bush, Wow.....why don't you tell us how you *really* feel?

[Jim2121]

(Al your a riot!) LOL...... well after WOW's post that kills my dealings with sandisk products.

[AEC]

I have a few older 'jump drives' such as the 256M and 512M, but as of late, I use only SD cards with a USB reader.

I have yet to suffer read/write fails, or have these cards screw up in such a way as to make data retrieval impossible.

My USB 256MB jump drive simply shows up as a disk drive, as Wowbagger said.

It's now going on 2 years since I bought it and has been providing me with excellent usage....Lexar does make a good dongle I'll say.

This is the device list as XP shows it...

USB Mass Storage Device

Generic Volume (F)

Lexar JUMP DRIVE SPORT USB Device

I just love the 'handiness' of taking important data with you, without having to resort to lugging around hard drives to access that data.

Makes life that much more enjoyable for me..

[jackhackett]

I've got a Sandisk Cruzer I use at work to load software onto laptops for MDTs, haven't seen any problem with it, I haven't noticed any autorun stuff going on.. am I missing something?

I've also got a couple of Sandisk CF cards for my camera, they seem to be the cards of choice among the high-end Canon camera users. They report very few failures among genuine Sandisk cards, most bad ones they see turn out to be fakes.

I've got a Crucial thumb drive that seems to lose things sometimes.. if I copy a folder to it sometimes it will miss a subfolder, if I browse the files they'll all appear to be there, but when go to transfer the files to another computer I find that they weren't actually copied to the drive.
I haven't figured out if this is a problem with the drive or with Windows.

One thing you have to watch for is fakes, especially if you buy them you-know-where.
There are a lot of fake Sandisk cards going around, and we got a couple of fake thumb drives at work (can't remember the brand), they looked okay until you tried to make a subdirectory.. they wouldn't let you do that. We bought them from a reputable source too, so you have to be careful.

[Wowbagger]

I've got a Sandisk Cruzer I use at work to load software onto laptops for MDTs, haven't seen any problem with it, I haven't noticed any autorun stuff going on.. am I missing something?

How old is the drive - this $#!7 of loading crapware and auto-run stuff is on the latest Sandisk Cruzer units, if yours is older than about 12 months then it is likely to be from prior to that.

I've got a Crucial thumb drive that seems to lose things sometimes.. if I copy a folder to it sometimes it will miss a subfolder, if I browse the files they'll all appear to be there, but when go to transfer the files to another computer I find that they weren't actually copied to the drive.
I haven't figured out if this is a problem with the drive or with Windows.

The problem is Windows. When you work with a drive, you *MUST* unmount it before you physically remove it from the computer, so that the computer will write all the data cached in RAM out to the disk. Failing to do so will leave the filesystem in an invalid state.

ALWAYS select "safely remove hardware" from the Windows toolbar, and wait for Windows to give you the all-clear before removing the media.

One thing you have to watch for is fakes, especially if you buy them you-know-where.
There are a lot of fake Sandisk cards going around, and we got a couple of fake thumb drives at work (can't remember the brand), they looked okay until you tried to make a subdirectory.. they wouldn't let you do that. We bought them from a reputable source too, so you have to be careful.

Again, this sounds more like a Windows problem than a disk problem. The thumb drive itself has no concept of "directories", "files" or anything else - all it knows is "sectors". It is up to the operating system to group sectors into files and directories, and it may do so in any fashion it deems prudent. For example, I can take a thumb drive and format it as EXT3, ReiserFS, XFS, or anything else I care to - the thumb drive has zero interest in the specifics, all it knows is that the host computer has asked for sector 0x64265, and that currently maps to this piece of flash. If you can write ANYTHING to the card, then the fact that you cannot create subdirectories is likely an OS problem.

And as for the fake issue: I buy my cards from reputable dealers, so the probability of any given card being fake is low. The probability that all the Sandisk cards I have are fakes is vanishingly small.

[HLA]

this is my third sandisk thumb drive and the only reason i'v replaced it it to get a bigger one, i still have the old ones and they still work like the day i got it. and the $40 is a great price for the 4 giger, the same one at newegg is $20 more. if anyone is having problems with them it may not be the drive, it could be a compatability issue with your machine. i use sandisk cards in my camera too and never had a problem with them either. the only thing i didn't like was the U3 but i just removed it.

if you are having trouble with files not copying correctly try right clicking on it and dragging it to where you want it and select copy or move, it may only be creating a shortcut and not copying the files.