2tb Pendrive

[Lorin Cupples]

I don't have a personal desktop to use; I have to use a shared laptop that my father uses. Dual booting will freak him out. I have tried Puppy, KNOPPIX, Tails, and Slax. Nothing worked well for me. I decided to install the whole OS onto my pendrive.

I've read articles saying it will kill my pendrive, about write and read cycles and how USB have less of it. So, shall I continue using it like this? If yes, then how can I maximize the life of my pendrive?

I've used this pendrive on 3 different machines, two laptops (Dell and a MacBook) and a desktop computer. I didn't face any issues except wifi worked properly on all the three systems. I've been using this pendrive for about 8 months and it's still working fine.

Swapping is the process of using part of the USB stick as volatile memory. This will increase the amount of RAM available, but it will result in a high number of read/writes. It is unlikely to increase performance significantly.

Using a journaling filesystem such as ext3 or ext4 WITHOUT a journal is an option to decrease read/writes. The obvious drawback of using a filesystem with journaling disabled is data loss as a result of an ungraceful dismount (i.e. post power failure, kernel lockup, etc.).

This will allow /var/tmp to use 50MB of RAM as disk space. The only issue with doing this is that any drives mounted in RAM will not persist past a reboot. Thus if you mount /var/log and your system encounters an error that causes it to reboot, you will not be able to find out why.

Although you can use pen drives to store and execute an Operating System (OS) they were not designed for that purpose like an SSD (Solid State Device) is. As such you will not find the manufacturer utilities such as TRIM nor Linux support such as the nvme command (Is it still bad to use swap on a modern SSD?).

The memory in flash drives is commonly engineered with multi-level cell (MLC) based memory that is good for around 3,000-5,000 program-erase cycles,[51] but some flash drives have single-level cell (SLC) based memory that is good for around 100,000 writes. There is virtually no limit to the number of reads from such flash memory, so a well-worn USB drive may be write-protected to help ensure the life of individual cells.

Estimation of flash memory endurance is a challenging subject that depends on the SLC/MLC/TLC memory type, size of the flash memory chips, and actual usage pattern. As a result, a USB flash drive can last from a few days to several hundred years.[52]

Original flash memory designs had very limited estimated lifetimes. The failure mechanism for flash memory cells is analogous to a metal fatigue mode; the device fails by refusing to write new data to specific cells that have been subject to many read-write cycles over the device's lifetime. Premature failure of a "live USB" could be circumvented by using a flash drive with a write-lock switch as a WORM device, identical to a live CD. Originally, this potential failure mode limited the use of "live USB" system to special-purpose applications or temporary tasks, such as:

As of 2011, newer flash memory designs have much higher estimated lifetimes. Several manufacturers are now offering warranties of 5 years or more. Such warranties should make the device more attractive for more applications. By reducing the probability of the device's premature failure, flash memory devices can now be considered for use where a magnetic disk would normally have been required. Flash drives have also experienced an exponential growth in their storage capacity over time (following the Moore's Law growth curve). As of 2013, single-packaged devices with capacities of 1 TB are readily available,[35] and devices with 16 GB capacity are very economical. Storage capacities in this range have traditionally been considered to offer adequate space, because they allow enough space for both the operating system software and some free space for the user's data.

I don't know how far your budget extends, but if you can afford an external USB drive, you can install your system on one. It will leave the hard drive in your father's computer completely unaffected.

If you have trouble with point 2 or point 4, or you get to a stage in point 4 where are unsure if it's safe to proceed, start a thread on Ubuntu Forums where people can ask you questions about your setup and feed back to you what to do next.

Each time you want to run your installed Ubuntu, plug in the USB external drive and reboot. Before leaving the laptop, shut it down completely (not restart, hibernate or sleep) and remove your USB external drive.

Finally, you need to consider all-too-often-neglected backups. Whether you use a pendrive or a USB external drive, they can fail suddenly. If you have few files, you can use something like Dropbox or Google Drive.

I immunized my USB pendrive after BitDefender suggested I do this, but this process replaced the name I had assigned with a generic "USB Drive" (and I need to be able to rename my USB drives). There is no going back, although I have tried many ways to rename it again. Is there a solution for this problem? Or, alternatively, a way to remove the immunization from my pendrive?

Since instructions from the first two steps didn't help and since the Bitdefender engineers might need to taka a deeper look at the issue, as more information is needed, my advice to you is to contact Bitdefender Consumer Support (Step 3).

After connecting a pendrive to a bad USB1.0 port (bad electrical connection, keeps connecting and disconnecting) and trying to read some of the photos in it and to copy them to the hard drive on Windows 10, the device crashed: photos were not opening and it was not possible to eject the pendrive.

After turning the computer off, unplugging the pendrive and starting all over again using another USB port, some photos were good/intact, but some got corrupted (top half of image good, other half either totally gray or covered in red or yellow with underlying picture still visible), in a very random order (corrupted photos were not in sequence, but mixed with good ones).

What could have happened here? I mean, if all that was done was reading/copying, why corruption happened?
Could this be a corruption of the file system table? Shouldn't all files be corrupted then?

You could even try a Windows based tool like DMDE as it allows you to unplug/plug the device while it waits for you and will continue once the drive is re-detected. Set IO access method to SCSI IO to minimize Windows hinderance.

Perhaps most important at this point is to keep the drive disconnected until you're all setup and ready to start. Also consider that this may be do-able if there's a few areas on the flash drive that cause it to crash, it quickly becomes undo-able when there's more than a few dozen perhaps.

I have recently installed LibreOffice (via Penguin llnux) on my new Chromebook.
When I try to save my work to a USB pendrive I am unable to because the media is flagged as read-only.
No problem saving the same file to other Chromebook file systems.
I would love to know how to save directly to an attached pendrive, please.
tia - Mike

I've recently been to a presentation in a client's office which is located in another city. My manager handed me his laptop, modem and pendrive for the presentation. It was on the last day of the week i.e. Thursday (in our country the weekends are Friday and Saturday), and also last day of submission of a crucial document of mine, so I was pretty much preoccupied and tensed regarding this document submission issue, hence I was very unfocused and absent-minded and as a result, I forgot to check whether all my manager's belongings are ok or not before leaving client's office. Yesterday, during office, I discovered that although I've returned his laptop promptly on Thursday, I forgot to return his modem, which had been inside my bag the entire weekend. I promptly returned it to him, and then he asked me, "Where's my pendrive?" I immediately searched my whole bag, and couldn't find it there. I couldn't remember whether I left it in my client office on Thursday, or in my home, so I told him I'd check for it in my home. After searching my home thoroughly, I still couldn't find it. Now I'm pretty sure I left it in my client's office, and unless an employee of my client found it and was honest enough not to steal it, there is very little chance of getting it back.

Now I'm done for, given my stupidity and lack of responsibility to lose my manager's pendrive which may contain vital information of which I have no knowledge. What should I do now? Should I consider today as my last working day? Normally, my manager never gets mad with anyone nor is he very strict, but this incident is serious and I'm afraid he might not take it lightly and punish me to some extent. The worst I can expect is termination. How can I approach him and explain to him this incident? I'm ok with any punishment as long as it doesn't lead me to termination.

Update:Right after posting this question, I called the client and they told me to wait for some time so that they can search for it. After almost 5 hours, they ringed me back and said they found it. I informed this to my manager and he just expressed his relief. He didn't say anything more to me regarding this. They're currently making an arrangement to send it back to my manager.

I was worried over this whole business because had he had any company sensitive data stored in the pendrive, this incident might not have been forgiven. Also, I saw in the comments section, many people asked me why I thought I may never get the pendrive back from the client. In my country, there are plenty of dishonest and immoral people, and the client in question wasn't even a proper client, rather just a prospective client whom we visited to promote one of our products, hence the presentation to them. I personally didn't find them much impressive, compared to the class of clients we generally use to have, so I wasn't much optimistic about their honesty. I was more than happy to be proved wrong twice the same day, first about my assumption of getting fired and then about the client not returning the pendrive. I'm lucky the situation didn't get worse and I consider this event as my "Lessons Learned".

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