memory stick question

joyfull

Just a quickie.

Can I leave a memory stick permanently plugged in?

I'm storing stuff on it daily & it's a chore to keep plugging / unplugging it.

Thank you.

vodkandredbull

Yes,

Infact its better to keep it plugged in as removing and removing wears away the contacts on the stick (this takes a long time though).

joyfull

Thanks vodkandredbull - now that sound an interesting tipple!

damo24

Be careful if you have a SATA hard drive, the computer might see the flash drive as an external disc and try to boot from that instead of the SATA drive.

esuhl

vodkandredbull wrote: »

its better to keep it plugged in as removing and removing wears away the contacts...

I'm not so sure - flash-based memory, as used in USB sticks has a limited number of reads/writes before the device will fail. If you're continually reading & writing to the device (if you have, say, a Word document that you keep open for editing), this will significantly reduce the time before the device fails.

Generally, you'd get better reliability and performance by using a hard disk. If you need to transfer files between PCs regularly, you might find Dropbox rather handy - it synchronises a folder between all your PCs automatically and is so useful that I've virtually stopped using USB drives (except on my one work PC where I can't install it). You can download it from http://www.getdropbox.com/.

Here's an article of USB flash reliability too, in case you're interested:
http://www.cnet.com.au/reliability-of-usb-flash-drives-questioned-240063522.htm