Hi. I was just wondering if excessive formatting damages a flash drive. Does it perform many write/erase cycles, decreasing the lifespan of the drive? I tend to format my drive, instead of deleting stuff from it.
New: Run-Command (Dec 2, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
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my guess is that after maby a fiew years of constant formating it may start to loose some of its capacity or (more likely) get slower. a better thing to do is only formatt when either you have massive amounts of data that you want to delete, your to lazy to highlight and right click and delete or there is a file that it wont let you delete. otherwise it may become corrupted, but that is so unlikely, unless your ........ a NOOB!!!
Zoop
If you all are not aware, any write is depreciation. The memory on a drive has only so many writes before it has to use the extra memory put on every flash drive by the manufacturer to mitigate loss. Using journalized file systems (like ntfs) is a bad idea because of the constant and increased activity. Defragging a flash drive is just as bad - there is no disk to sort files on, the seek time is constant, so you are just using up your drive. A quick format isn't that bad, since I'm pretty sure it only rewrites the tables not the data. My question is, how much writing does portapps do?
Formatting writes the new filesystem over whatever was there. It writes the file allocation table (FATx) or journal (NTFS, e2fs), and then zeros. Deleting a file merely removes the pointer, making the space available. Shredding explicitly overwrites the data. Formatting causes more writes.
Vintage!
after a while, dont you think that the components age would start to show?!?!?!? cuz i know what happens to old computer parts, they start working like there old. i have a comp that is 18 and a half years old and i think it finnaly may have crapped out, dono cuz i have been having trouble with the ide cable on all of my comps. seems to take all of the power out of the drive connected.
Zoop
certain components "get old and tired" after years
yes, a flash drive will start to cave in on itself after a few years (mine die after 18 months of exissive usage) but most things like drives are not THAT costly to replace
I still have a thumb drive that has been working since 2002. it may be slow but it get its work done. damn well ought to seening as it cost me 200 freaking dollars back then >:|