Negative Effects From Formatting Thumb Drives?

[lxskllr]

Deleting Large amounts of data takes forever on my thumb drive. It's much quicker to do a quick format. Is there any reason I shouldn't use this method to remove data from flash devices?

 

[onlyCOpunk]

Doesn't matter. The drive is flash based, there is no "wear and tear" related to it. The only wear and tear you will get from a thumb drive is from taking it in and out of the USB port.

 

[Synomenon]

I thought flash drives had a limited amount of reads and writes.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: IsLNdbOi
I thought flash drives had a limited amount of reads and writes.

Yea that's the thing. I was wondering if formatting instead of deleting could be worse for it in some way. After giving it some thought, I think it could be better for it. A quick format would just erase the file table instead of deleting every bit of data. I'm no expert though, so I thought I'd ask.

 

[Kirby64]

The format that is 'negative' to a flash drive is a full format. Full formats not only erase the file index table, they also write all the blocks of data back to 0. Quick formats, as you said, just delete the table.

Honestly, there's very little difference from deleting each file individually and a quick format.

 

[pkrush]

Honestly, unless you're trying to run Windows off a flash drive, you're probably going to destroy the drive before you even come close to the write limit on the flash. Even if you were running Windows from it, it would take at least a year of constantly paging out data to the drive to wear out a flash cell. On the other hand, I think I've killed at least 5 flash drives due to static, having the USB connectors snapped off, or being plugged into other people's broken computers. Just remember to keep backups of everything on the drive because even though they're much hardier than the floppies of yesteryear, they're still easy to unintentionally destroy.

 

[0roo0roo]

quick format is basically like deleting files. it doesn't overwrite the actual data. wear is probably similar.
wear and tear on drives is an issue sure. but its really not in the long run, by the time the drive fails from normal use it will be effectively useless and horribly obsolete.
this is assuming you don't do something boneheaded like use it as a swap drive or something where its being written to a couple times a second 24/7 or whatever.
as for drive speed, theres plenty of difference between drives. some drives are very slow, some are fast. fast tends to cost more.

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: onlyCOpunk
Doesn't matter. The drive is flash based, there is no "wear and tear" related to it. The only wear and tear you will get from a thumb drive is from taking it in and out of the USB port.

Actually, you're wrong. There is wear and tear on a flash drive. That's the inherent issue of the technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks."

The good thing is that the number is so freakishly high it would take forever before you wouldn't be able to write to a cell ever again.

 

[lxskllr]

Thank's for the input guys. I try to minimize harm, and maximize performance on all of my stuff, even if it's only theoretical. It's the same reason I put my page file on a separate drive. It doesn't really make a difference, but it's easy enough to do, so why not? I wasn't sure if formatting would cause additional wear or not. It's significantly faster, so I figured it would be worse for the drive It seems like no performance gains are free. I also like to assume I have the worst example of a product. In the case of flash, It has a limited number of writes. If the drive is supposed to have 100,000 write cycles, I'm sure some beat drives get through that only have 50,000 or so. I assume I'm going to get that drive, because that's the way things usually work for me

So anyway, thank's again. I'll keep using quick formats, and enjoy my speedy deletions