9. December 2008 by David Peterson.

Every once in a while you will need to reformat your USB drive. The reason is the files may have gotten corrupted.

On hard drives the corruption could come from scratches on the disk itself. Maybe the unit was bumped while it was shutting down. Regardless of how the scratch got there your data in that section of the disk is probably gone.

On solid state devices like USB Flash Memory there are no moving parts but your data can still get corrupted. Put this device next to a magnet or remove it from the USB port without shutting it down properly and you can get a small electrical shock that will ruin the data.

 You know you have a problem when you insert the USB device into port and your information is missing or you can’t open the device.

Try this…

 Reformat the device by inserting it into the USB port.

 Go to “My Computer” (Vista users - just go to “Computer”) and select the drive by left clicking on it.

 Once you have selected the drive, right click on it and choose “format.” If you don’t see “format” there then go up to the top left hand corner and left click on the “file” navigational tab. You will see “format” in that spot.

 A small popup will occur that will look like this picture….

The capacity will be filled in, the file system should be left at FAT 32 (File Allocation Table - a standard format for post Window 95 operating systems), the Allocation unit size should be left at ”default.”

Also deselect the “Quick Format.” By doing this the  entire disk  is formatted.

Then hit start. Depending on the size of the drive this could take seconds, minutes, or longer.

That’s it - Oh yea, don’t forget to back up your data if you can. You are not really erasing data here you are just formatting the drive. With that being said once you reformat you may not be able to recover your existing data.

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3. November 2008 by admin.

I’m David A. Peterson and I am your admin for this USB Flash Memory blog. I currently own and manage several USB flash memory websites that focus on either bulk, promotional, or retail sales of these devices. This site is just a collection of information that we currently use for our USB flash memory company.  I decided to use a blog as a form of posting information just in case anyone else wanted to add information to our repository. Your comments and questions are welcomed.

Over the years the devices have evolved from just saving information to securing, encrypting, emailing, promoting, booting, and a variety of other uses. Who knows where the product uses will end, but what we do know is that we need a spot to contain all of the information so the product can be fully utilized by the consumer and developers.

We have been selling flash memory since 2001. A lot has changed since 2001. Back in the day a 512MB usb flash memory drive would have cost the consumer right around $375.00/unit. Now days these devices are dirt cheap - and nobody wants a 512MB drive anymore.

Another change that has happened over the past few years is memory size. Our top seller in 2001 was 32MB. You can’t even buy that memory size anymore. It will not be long before we are talking about a 1TB (1 terabyte = 1 trillion bytes or 1,000 gigabytes) device not a 1GB (1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes or 1,000 megabytes) device. Imagine 1TB that you can hold in your hands.

The drives have also become much faster. All the drives today should be 2.0 compliant, which means that they can transfer data a 480 Mbps - that is pretty darn quick. That is a little better than “firewire” at the moment.

At any rate - Thank you for visiting.

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