General Discussion

Since the lifetime of the NAND flash memory is quoted as between 10K and 100K write cycles, and I see the little LED flashing even when I'm not aware of doing anything to cause thumb drive access, the question naturally arises:

How long are these drives expected to last before the first bits start failing?

I know that I'm supposed to do backups regardless of the storage medium, but this is my first time out with a flash drive so I'm rather curious.

Also,

In a modern flash drive, does the flash memory controller remap storage addresses to equalize the write activity across the drive?

http://www.uk-easy-hosting.com/adimg/pf.php?fid=86

I just got it the other day for wining in some design competiton on a forum bc I do graphic designing and stuff I think it one of the smallest usb flash cards I've ever seen pretty sweet 1 GB nice

...where data traces means "stuff left behind in buffers, the paging file, on disk or anywhere except your thumb drive or other removable media."

I have a TrueCrypted 2gb thumb drive with the PortableApps suite installed. I find myself automatically using Windows Notepad to edit stuff I like to think of as secured on my thumb drive. I have no idea what (if any) mechanisms Notepad has to avoid leaving data traces on the host system, wherever that may be, so I googled and found Steganos LockNote.

LockNote looks pretty good, it comes from a SourceForge project and so I'm assuming that it's fully Open Source which is a must for security software in my opinion.

This is great — Toshiba plans to bring out a limited edition 16GB USB dongle. What would you do with 16GB in your pocket? Who knows? As the writer of this story says, "It may be one of the occasional cases of: who cares? It's a 16GB USB drive that fits in your pocket and weighs 12 grams!

http://www.techworld.com/storage/new...fm?newsID=6755

I'm a newbie regarding to PortableApps.

On this site you provide the "Portable Apps Suite". I would like to know whether one can select the applications one wants to have installed or does one need to install all the applications provided in the suite ?

Does anyone know if the Venrilo versions 2.1.4 and 2.3.0 can work as portables, i haven´t been able to try it out myself cuz i don´t have a portable usb yet, have orderd one.

The thing i know about these .exe files is that you don´t have to install then, if you have winrar you can easily extract them from the .exe file.

If anyone have tried this or can try for me it would be sweet so i know it works.

Thanks!

I searched on google and in this website, but there aren't howtos, somebody know how to make openoffice.org portable?

I can easily port Vice (ancient Commodore 64 emulator) and MAME (http://www.mame.net/) will work already out of the box.

which do you think is better? I personally only have a MSN account if anyone wants to know.

which one should i use, and why?

Just wanted to update everybody with a status update. The switch of the apps from Portable AppName to AppName Portable is nearly complete. I used the opportunity to add in new features (like Live CD support and in-place upgrades) to every app as they were being worked on. The last 2 apps are Gaim and OpenOffice.org. They're both in pre-release now. Since Gaim Portable 2.0 B3.1 seems solid, I'll be releasing that later today or tomorrow. I'd like a few more people to test out OpenOffice.org Portable 2.0.3 before I release it, especially people with Windows 2000 boxes. So, I think I'm going to shoot for releasing on Monday or Tuesday for that.