Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Less and less space for reasons other than storing stuff on it?
You will always see a bit less space than the stated size of the drive, because the stated size is the raw size, but formatting takes a bit off the top.
I'd be a bit startled if you saw less space due to cells being marked bad and mapped out. It's going to take a while for any cell to actually get erased and rewritten over 100,000 times.
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Dennis
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Thanks Dennis. Yeah, I'm sure it was just more and more storage, but when you suggested the dying cells bit I think my imaginaation ran away with me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
On Unix systems, and Linux systems whose design derives from Unix, files whose name begins with a . are not shown in a directory listing. To see them, you must do "ls -a".
Many things create hidden files. There are where config files from programs you use are normally kept. The program will have a master config file, usually in the /etc hierarchy, and local ones in the user's home directories, which will override th4e settings in the global file if they exist. For instance, your shell will have a ,profile or a .login file.
Text editors are likely to create journal or backup copy files as hidden, because the odds are you don't want to see them cluttering up a directory display. (They are easy enough to see if you want to.)
Whether they are worth keeping is a judgement call. Which editors do you have installed? How likely are you to need to revert to a backup of what you were editing? The editor may have a configuration setting that will let you turn off keeping a backup if you don't need them. The amount of space they take is unlikely to be a concern, so the question is "Do you need the backups?" Since you don't by default see the backup files unless you did something like alias ls to ls -a in your shell, you probably don't care that hard that they exist.
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Dennis
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That is really interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I already had a hidden file slightly save me, so I'm all for keeping them. If I get too many of them I can start picking them off. One thing that confused me was that my file finder was showing the hidden files to be located in folders that they clearly weren't when I looked. Then I figured out I had to click on 'show hidden files' in "view."
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
That's actually not a surprise. Kingston is one the the budget lines, and you get what you pay for.
There are about five outfits that actually make the flash media used in the drive. Everyone who sells flash drives buys media from one of them and puts it in their own packaging with their own logo.
Years back, I bought a PNY SD card for use in a PDA, and did some benchmarks. The PNY had read speeds comparable to the Sandisk and Lexar Media SD cards I already had, but write speeds were an order of magnitude slower. (It took so long to perform the write test I thought the device had hung and was about to reset it.) It turned out the drive uses Toshiba media. A correspondent on a PDA focused web board saw the same issue with Kingston SD cards, which also used Toshiba media.
(I also had an Adata card fail when the plastic packaging did - the glue holding the halves together failed.)
I decided to stick to Sandisk, which is one of the outfits that does make its own flash. It cost a bit more, but I had less quality worries.
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Dennis
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Great! I'm two days too late. (I just bought a Kingston from Newegg. It's 16GB and has no LED light. (I didn't think of this being a disadvantage when I bought it.) It was $7.19 though and has a cap on the end. I don't like the retractable ones because I'm afraid crap is going to get in there when I put them in my pockets. I knew the Kingston was slow, though, and that was not an issue for me. Interestingly the only pen drive I had that totally crapped out was a PNY attache. The lock/unlock switch stuck and the drive became 'read only.' Right now I'm struggling with the same sort of problem (the drive being 'read only') with a Verbatim 3GB flash drive. And finally--Yes!--I have a 32 GB Sandisk.
So who, besides Sandisk, makes the better flash drives? I've heard good things about Patriot too.