BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns The Boss want us to fix his USB stick. "It's broken," the PFY explains, very, very patiently. "Like it was broken three weeks ago," I add. "And like it was broken a few weeks before that," the PFY also adds. "And like it was broken just before Christmas," I say, putting even more …
I had one of the tiny Corsair ones that are just a metal case on my keyring (like this), and eventually the top part of the USB port got caved in. I did bend it back, but that loosened the board inside.
Just like the boss, I never threw it away, and it lives in a drawer with other sub-standard USB sticks that "might come in handy one day".
I've done the substandard USB disk thing. It never works out in the end unless you're willing to treat any USB disk as temporary only, for moving files between two computers that are in very close proximity. Otherwise, you'll eventually rely on it the day it breaks for something too important. For example, the time I had one of those and I needed to install a firmware update on something that only accepted them on a USB disk. It chose halfway during firmware installation as the time to give up, and even though the disk wasn't permanently broken, the device was doing a good imitation of broken. Fortunately, I was able to restore it, but it took a lot longer than using a different disk would have.
I find them useful for running photo's down to the local print shop and for swapping "too large to email" video clips with family/friends. Can ensure (to a limited value of certainty) they are erased of any other data and will not be too unhappy if they don't get promptly returned.
Yes, I know about various cloud services for data sharing - but largely prefer to avoid them because "cloud"
But do you do this with disks that are intact or ones where they're already starting to show mechanical damage? The ones that have never failed and aren't visibly damaged can be trusted for a while. It's trying to preserve one that's already suffered one injury that's the risky part. I've used drives where the case fell apart so it's just a board and a USB plug, and one of those lasted about three years like that, but that's the kind of disk you really shouldn't put a firmware image on, especially if the board concerned is not in a straight line. I wasn't stupid enough to use the one that was bent thirty degrees for anything sensitive, and it did last longer than I expected, but that predictably was a sign of approaching death.
Those do seem awesome, and the pricing for the sub-256 GB models is very reasonable. (The jump from 32 GB to 64 GB to 128 GB, for instance, is $5 US each — from $20 to $25 to $30. The jump to 256 GB, OTOH, almost doubles the price to $55.)
But the design of that product page annoys the crap out of me. Here's how the options are ordered. See if you can spot the sorting algorithm used, and why it's exactly the WRONG one:
Do better, Corsair.
USB sticks are the floppy disks (remember those?) of the modern age. They're universally crap and they universally fail, usually when you least want them to. If you have some files you want to see again then set up something like Dropbox or pCloud or Gods-forbid OneCloud and stick them in there, and you then have a better than sporting chance that you will see them again. On a USB stick, mostly they work and sometimes they don't.
I thought there was going to be some misdirection with the drive while all the keys were copied, you know in silly putty epoxy resin for casting keys later!(This tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds!) Then gaslight the hell out of the boss, move his car, rearrange his desk, add extra booze into his secret stash...
RPN calculators only require a four deep stack but clearly the imbecile calculus of manglement needs at least an infinite or better stack.
Keeping an old tinmans soldering iron handy to "repair" the boss' dodgy devices containing surface mount components is brilliant.
My father had one for soldering the lead drain pipes when modernising the bathroom in his late Victorian house (in the colonies, 1960s) but I remember his using that iron and a large stick of tinmans solder to solder 20mm lengths of copper wire onto the 5mm leads of some Ge transisters I had removed from a circuit board. The devices worked perfectly so I guess skill counts.
Back when hard disks were worth a few quid and some models suffered from "sticktion" Simon's scenario wasn't uncommon. You could only drop or belt with a blunt instrument a drive that stopped working only so many times before it was pining for the fjords.
There was always a one to one correspondance between users that never backed up and the owners of such drives.
Learnt fairly quickly to mount a "heroic" operation to recover the drives contents but while the operation was usually a success unfortunately and invariably the patient had died.
"Keeping an old tinmans soldering iron handy"
Not quite at the same scale, but in the early 1980s I was a member of some sort of hobby club. One of the projects was to build a radio: started by drilling rows of holes in a sheet of aluminium so I could fold it into a chassis. Then installed the valve bases and tagboards for the wiring on it, then soldered all the parts using a 60 W or so soldering iron. Then built a cabinet out of plywood and mixed up some stain to finish it. Pretty stupidly outdated at that time, but now it would be considered seriously cool retro stuff.
So I asked the chap for advice when I went to get my own soldering iron and mentioned that I might want to do something with those newfangled transistors. He suggested just going for the 60 W model and being careful to solder quickly! So that's how I got my heavy soldering iron with the wooden handle, still got it somewhere. Though when I started assembling circuit boards with 7400-series TTL logic I did get a smaller one :).
Which reminds me I should really do something with all those boxes of valves and vintage radio components I inherited from my father-in-law. And the Rees Mace marine radio with rotary converter. Perhaps when I retire.
@Doctor Syntax
"...needing an external heat source?"
The first soldering iron I saw was a solid copper iron (shaped something like this, but mounted sideways so that it looked like an axe: https://www.oldhandtools.co.uk/2-large-copper-soldering-irons---js-rock-sons-of-cradley) that he heated with an oxy-acetylene torch (but for serious work it was normally heated in a fire).
And the flux came in a round tin - after heating the iron he had to rub it in the flux before applying the solder.
Not much good for surface mounted chips, though.
-------------------------> For the fire needed to heat the thing, obviously!
I remember the old soldering iron which required heating up in the fire. More like a cattle-brand than a tool and my fingers still bear evidence of its multi-function.
However, my father was keen on electronics although it was thermionic valves in those days (he built our first TV in the 1950's): he had purchased an electric soldering iron. It was powered by a cotton-covered two-core cable and he connected it to work from a bayonet light-fitting via an adaptor you could buy for this very purpose. It meant that the power-cable dangled down from the lamp-fitting and was rather out of the way during soldering. Plenty of singed shirts and arm-air though..... My ability to fault-find by electrical-odour stems from those days.
I'm always puzzled by the attraction of free USB sticks. I can't imagine any other kind of low cost* personal equipment that people would avidly pick up and make their own.
On my desk the things seem to breed. Worse, they get mixed up with USB receivers from wireless mice, which also proliferate.
* Current price on Amazon < 1p/GB. They can't all be fakes. If they are, customer satisfaction is surprisingly high.
I'm sitting at my desk when an IM pops up from a "principal developer" asking me if I can help recover his solid state drive (SATA, not USB), which has suddenly stopped working altogether. "Not bloody likely," I think, sensing doom in the air.
"How important is it?" I ask.
"I have a month's worth of work on it," he tells me.
"Did you, perchance, check any of it into source control or at least copy it to the network?" I ask, already knowing the answer. Sure enough, his code was "not ready" to be sent to git (said "principal developer" apparently never having heard of branching) and he didn't think SSDs ever went bad.
$3000 later, a data recovery specialist confirmed that the drive was indeed toast, requiring the developer to re-create his work from scratch. Sadly, no soldering iron was involved.
Thing is, we are all so used to things like SSDs (certainly in desktop-like scenarios) essentially lasting "forever" that we are surprised when the occasional one just dies.
I had a Samsung Evo 860 M.2 SSD in a Windows machine, the machine was five or six years old but had had a very easy life until a couple of years before failing and the SSD was nowhere near its expected TBW when the thing just died. Like it wasn't even plugged in. Doesn't register in an external M.2 reader either. About as capable of storing data as the similarly-sized paper bookmark I'm using at the moment. No real data stored on the device, just the Windows install and some working files, but bloomin' annoying nevertheless, and quite unusual. It's the first and so far still the only M.2 format device I've ever lost, and I can't honestly point to more than one, maybe two, SATA SSDs which have retired themselves, and that's a mix of devices at quite a lot of price- and performance-points.
I have an identical M.2 device, bought at about the same time (might even have been in the same order, can't remember now) which is in a much more heavily-used machine and is still going strong a year later, and another in a machine at home. I'm keeping an eye on them though.
M.
I once lost six weeks worth of work ..... when I found out that after I left the meeting where it was decided I was to do the work my Manglers then decided it wasn't actually needed ..... but they never bothered to tell me of the change of plans!
---------> Guess I ended up not caring cos I got paid anyway!
Failure to know how to create a working branch would be more than enough for any "principal developers" round these parts to find that word "principal" replaced with "junior". Failure to commit (and push) your work for a month would likely be taken as evidence of no work having actually taken place that month.
So far I have only had one SSD fail, and that was in the early days of SSD. My work computer's Intel SSD up and died after less than a year .fortunately I kept very little on the machine that wasn't also on a network drive so it mostly cost time while IT replaced the drive and reinstalled everything, Since then, knock particle board the closes I've been to SSD failure is a bad controller chip on a motherboard
I know this is an unpopular opinion on these forums, but cloud backup services have the advantages of being inexpensive, easy to use, and off-site from your primary data. Whether you trust the integrity or security of a particular cloud provider is another matter, but for the typical user, they offer a significant data redundancy advantage over what the user would typically have, which is either nothing or the aforementioned janky USB stick.
I don't have a problem with cloud backup, especially at home, but Google drive, One drive etc. is not backup.
I have important stuff in three locations, my workstation, my nas, and my workstation backed up to backblaze. the nas/workstation should handle mostly all hardware faults, and the online backup for more catastrophic scenarios. "Cheap" and safe enough for my needs.
Exactly. We have a whole group at work that does data manglement, backups et c. - ok, it is somebody else's computer, but it's still the company's machine.
At home I have a backup machine. This stuff does indeed end up on somebody else's computer, but it is encrypted as soon as it leaves my system. Keys are stored at two (apart from on my local network) undisclosed places, with some geo redundancy.
So: local machine -> local backup -> remote backup
There's some use cases where for security reasons, the only way to transfer files from one syterm to the other ( or from one network to another network ) is through an USB stick.
Ok, that stick is not unplugged from A and going straight to B... It goes through some appliance ( well a PC turned appliance ) that's just a store of antivirus softwares which are all run against the key and it's content.
Funny I have a USB of downloaded music videos for my trucks Android head unit, this weekend (Before a trip in it) I added a whole chunk of new stuff to copy across to it.....
Anyone care to guess the transfer method..
Icon - Which fucking pocket is it lost in!
I have the one my dad used in the 50's. A wonderful American Beauty that was at least 100 watts and about 12 inches long and a tip that was about 3/8ths of an inch around. Man could that thing solder. Never had a problem with it cooling down between joints. At one time my mom used it for punching holes in plastic flower pots.
One could compare it to a tank very easily.
> A wonderful American Beauty that was at least 100 watts and about 12 inches long and a tip that was about 3/8ths of an inch around.
Vulcan is still in business, in the cow-pasture, not too far down the highway from here, tho not doing soldering irons now. https://www.vulcanelectric.com/ . My Vulcan310 is a 310-Watt job over a foot long (adjustable) and over an inch diameter.
get your ----ing USB stick out of the ---ing networked PC !
Although users of such devices around me have all evolved to the point of knowing not to put a USB they've 'just found' in any of the works PCs. partly because of the insults but mostly because its hard to breed when I've just put their nadgers on a workbench and used a #2 copper/hide mallet on them.
PS If they do it again, THEN I'll get nasty. "PFY ! Prepare the wood chipper..........." "Feet first or head first this time boss? "
yeah, had a smart, very smart algebra teacher once bring me his drive and ask why he couldn't access any of the files on it when he was at work... our network must be broken! It worked fine at home. That's because he created shortcuts to the files on the other USB stick, and you guessed it, still plugged into the home computer, so of course he could still see and read the files when plugging it in at home.
The worst part was he wouldn't\couldn't admit that the icons on his new drive were shortcut Icons!!
Thumbs up for a different reason!
It really could be either, because neither is designed to last forever, but in my experience, it's usually the USB socket if one of those has failed. Perhaps the most common is mechanical problems. The plug and flash are fine, but something nasty has happened to the middle. It's easy to bend one by accident, which is why there have been so many recommendations for metal-cased drives here.
I remember back in college working on my project for Comp Sci, worth approximately 60% of the grade
Always kept the code on a USB stick to work on in class or at home (just in case I dreamt up a solution at 2am and needed to wake up and code it before I forgot...)
Anyway, predictably, the thing dies about a month before the submission deadline.
Luckily I had the mental wherewithal to always copy it's contents to the local machine I was working on before unplugging it... Crisis averted.
I keep an assortment of USB sticks on my desk and in my computer bag but they are almost exclusively bootable images for installation or troubleshooting. I do use a few for holding photos, to share or have printed. I also have one novelty USB shaped like Hello Kitty with Ubuntu on it so I can "boot to the head".
I don't trust the long term stability of USB sticks so everything goes on external drives, optical disk or cloud
