USB Flash drives, pen drives and memory card have become must requirement if you have a mobile phone or laptop and has become integral part of data storage and safe means of transport of data from one gadget to other.
Flash memory card and memory card are not permanent devices, its age depends on how we use it, so one or the other day it will be corrupted and it will be for no use.
Memory cards and Flash drives are available with two price ranges- local duplicate ones and other branded one. If you choose to go with the brand ones it will be double the cost and comparatively it will offer better performance and extra life. Maybe people are caught up with duplicate items.
Recently I was surprised to see 32 GB Transcend Pen Drive from one guy who was selling it just for $ 15, I picked up one and when I used it two or three times then it took the reverse side and then I realised that its was a duplicate item. Pen drives are not so cheap and if they are cheap then they are duplicate ones.
Few Tips for Better Life of USB Flash Drive
- For a better life of your pen drive, flash drive or memory card make use of Safety remove hardware of from your computer. Its like when you plug-in your pen drive through USB an icon is placed in the quick launch bar of the Windows menu showing that an external media is connected to the computer. Remove only when you have left clicked on the green icon and select removed device. This makes sure that your pen drive is not exposed to normal wear and tears. Also it might end up in corrupting some storage sectors of the pen drive.
- Make sure to connect your Pen drive to the PC which has antivirus protection and its virus free. Connecting Pen drive to a PC which has virus exposes your drive to virus and serious threats.
- Disable Autorun of your pen drive. This will make windows to try open the documents of USB Stick fast and quick.
- Scan with a proper antivirus to make sure that there is no virus on your pen drive.
- Protect your USB stick for physical wear and tears.
If your flash drive is corrupted and you want to repair it by fixing the errors present on your drive. Fixing the errors on the Windows drive is easy and may remove bad sectors from your flash drive. To open Fix Errors in Windows follow the steps here
- Right click on the icon of pen drive present on your computer
- Click on Properties.
- Now navigate to Tools under which you will find Check Now options for Error Checking.
This will automatically check for any errors and it will remove those errors.
Now if still you are not able to run your pen drive successfully than formatting your pen drive will do it for you.
Formatting your Pen Drive : Formatting pen drive is quite easy. Generally it’s not recommended to every time format your removable drive but it case your drive is slow and you want to make it faster than you can do this by following the steps mentioned below
- Right click on the removable drive icon and select Format.
- This will open Format Removable Disk Wizard under which you will have options on how you want to format your drive.
- By formatting all the data on your flash drive would be deleted and can’t be recovered unless you use softwares to recover data.
- Select Quick Format and click on Start to start formatting.
And if it still doesn’t work or it gives under performance, get it fixed from the customer support centre of the flash drive provider if it’s under warranty and if it fails to buy a new USB drive with higher storage and faster transfer rate.
Dreamhost Review says
Transcend and Kingston pen drives are the ones whose duplicate pieces are very easily available all around. Similar to what you said, I too was fooled once with duplicate drives which were sold to me for just $20 but the actual price of the same was $85. It was like a trick and I was suspicious, but greedy too at the same time. Had to just let the $20 go, as the pen drive stayed working fine for just a few days before getting corrupted.