I recently found a need to acquire a new USB keychain flash drive. One prudent-yet-fun use for this drive would be as a portable backup for my laptop’s hard drive. Lately I’ve been using the laptop as my primary work computer so I decided it was time to start a more *cough* thorough backup regimen. That is, I wasn’t doing any kind of back up of my computer and I thought that was being foolish. I can recover if the drive is damaged, but there’s nothing you can do if your car is burglarized and laptop stolen (as happened to brother last month).
I’d been jonesing for one of these since seminconductor prices started falling a few years back. Flash RAM manufacturers have been releasing ever-denser USB drives since then – I remember drooling over a 64 MB flash drive five years ago. So yesterday’s purchase was for me a personal vindication of sorts.
Fry’s has a large selection of flash RAM on display, but anything with more than 8 GB of storage is locked up in a cage and you need the sales associate to come unlock it for you. I’d originally wanted a 64 GB drive, but when I saw how big the case was I decided against it (it looked, perhaps intentionally – like a folded pocketknife). A little big for my tastes.
The next largest device capacity was 32 GB, which was more than enough for me. My laptop is also about five years old and back when it shipped it had what was then a high-capacity 30 GB 2.5 inch internal hard disk drive. I’ve still got the same drive so it’s funny to think that I am going to be able to fit the entire contents of that drive onto a piece of plastic roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum.
The device I settled on is the Patriot Xporter USB Flash Drive. At $99 it was just within the price range I wanted. To take some of the sting out of it there’s also a $15 mail-in rebate right now.
The device worked great except I couldn’t copy anything on to it that was larger than 4 GB. Was this some sort of limitation of the driver? Or Windows XP? I looked into it and the Patriot website says there is a utility you need to format the drive because there is security software on there. In order to get the software you have to e-mail them. Forget that!
Also, the drive would only format with FATBITS. I don’t mind FATBITS, but I’d prefer NTFS. There are certain security permissions that will work in NTFS and not in FATBITS. I’m certain there are other limitations as well. Again, I wasn’t sure if this was because of a limitation in XP. The device’s packaging boasted Vista compatibility which undermined my confidence in XP’s ability to take full advantage the memory stick’s features. So much insecurity!
SOLUTION
I started cruising around the web until I found an awesome formatting utility. God bless Hewlitt-Packard engineers!
The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool is a tool that Goldilocks would have fallen in love with. It does just the right amount of stuff – formats the volume and changes the file structure. It also lets you alter the size of the blocks, if you’re so inclined. I don’t go there because I don’t know what I’m doing with that stuff.
Worked like a charm!
QuantumTom 