[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

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.

Visions of a virtual plague killing off cells right and left?

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."

Define "too many". The space taken by a hidden file is likely to be on the order of a few KB. In the context of current drive capacities, you don't care. I don't see why you are concerned. If they aren't taking a significant amount of space (and they aren't), and you don't see them by default in a directory display, why do you care?

It sounds like you're using a GUI file manager, so yes, you do have to tell it to show you hidden files. You can probably tell the file manager (which one?) to do so by default, but I wouldn't. I don't need the clutter on the directory display.

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.

Not having an LED light isn't a huge concern for me. Among other reasons, I have a USB 2.0 hub such things are plugged into, and it's placed such that I wouldn't see the LED light. There are other ways to know the drive is active, and the progress of transfers.

Depending upon your usage, the Kingston should be fine.

So who, besides Sandisk, makes the better flash drives? I've heard good things about Patriot too.

Patriot is one of the OEMs who buys flash media from one of the outfits that makes it, and puts it in their own packaging with their own label. The last I knew, the big boys making flash were Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, Sandisk, and Toshiba. (Toshiba originated NAND flash.)

The problem is that there isn't a good way to know who actually made the flash used in a particular card or flash drive, unless you get it and have a utility that can display the information. It's not something advertised on the card. You buy from one of the big boys and pay more, or you take your chances.

The big concern most folks will have will be flash speed. For instance, digital cameras normally use SD cards as storage. The camera owner's concern will be that the card is fast enough to keep up with the shots being taken. That issue bemused my in the PNY card I mentioned, since ti was being sold for use in digital cameras. I thought "What happens if I snap the shutter on my camera fast enough that the previous shot is still being stored to the drive when the new one needs to be stored? At what point do I run into problems because the cache the image is stored to gets full because it can't be emptied fast enough?" You see things now like Class 4 or Class 10 storage as speed indicators.

My attitude towards any sort of purchase where there are multiple possible vendors is to toss out the highest and lowest price offers, and look at the stuff in the middle. I likely don't need the high priced spread for what I'm doing, and low prices come at the expense of speed/quality.

I just got an Android tablet that I posted about elsewhere. The specs are mediocre but the price ($20) was right. My SO bought a 16GB microSDHC card for her Nook Tablet that she wound up not using, so I popped it into mine. It's a SanDisk she got off of eBay, but for my uses, it doesn't matter. The card will have stuff added to it from my PC, and only be read on the tablet. It's been just fine this far.

And there are always quirks. For instance, I still have and use a Palm TX PDA. The TX has an SD card slot, but the largest card it will take is 4GB, because it only handles SD cards and the biggest SD card made is 4GB. To get higher capacities, you need to get an SDHC card, but the TX can't read them.

A programmer named Dmitry Grindberg (who works for Google these days) wrote a replacement slot driver for Palm OS to enable use of SDHC cards, and a while back he changed it from shareware to freeware. I installed it on my TX, and got an 8GB SanDisk SDHC card for it. The problem is, most of the time, the TX simply doesn't recognize the card is there. Pull the card and re-insert and power the device off and on often enough, and the TX may see and read it. The FAQ says it's a known problem, specific to particular devices and cards, and hard to solve. I wouldn't have thought SanDisk would be a problem card, but...

Since the main use case for the TX was eBook viewer, I got a larger card to have more space to store them, and eBook viewer chores are shifting to the tablet, I'm not going to bother trying to make it work. The TX works fine with the 4GB card, it's not out of space, and the 8GB card can be used elsewhere.
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Dennis