Protecting your Pen Drive (USB)

Nowadays, USB sticks are the most useful and handy storage solution and cheap too. Protecting data needs to be taken care of, hence you need to protect your USB. Below are a few points for the same.

Life of the USB
The only thing(apart from normal wear and tear) the affects life of a usb drive is write cycles.You can read data from a drive any number of times you want but writing a data to it will decrease its life by a bit. Writing includes deleting/defragmenting etc. Thus unless sufficient space is not left in your drive for your new file , DO NOT delete old data from it , just insert more new data.









Defragment
Unlike normal hard disks with moving spindles , pen drives do not have slow and fast zones. Data kept anywhere will be read at same speed in a pen drive. Thus NEVER defrag your pen drive as it introduces one more write cycle and reduce life of ur pen drive (by just a little bit). Also usb drives don't have any head that needs to move its position (thus wasting time to read a fragmented file on an a hard drive drive).

Safely remove your external drive
Well speed of Hard disk is much faster than pen drive. Thus when you transfer data to yuor pen drive , to speed things up , some of the data may be "cached" by your Operating System. Thus when the dialogue box showing file transfer to pen drive has vanished , the data may not have been completely written to pen drive. That is why whenever you copy something to your pen drive you must always make sure that you "safely remove the hardware" just to be sure that all data has been transferred.

When you are reading from your pen drive , no such thing occurs , thus the moment the transfer dialog is complete , tou can simply take out ur pen drive without any fear of data corruption.

File system
Default is fat 32. some guys prefer ntfs , linux geeks may try out ext3.
Well these journaled file systems carry no real benefit in terms of data security.
but they have a lot of overhead in terms of journaling , keeping extra record bout files etc.This again introduces useless write cycles which again is bad for life for ur pen drive.

Preferable file systems ----- fat32 / ext2.

Viruses
If you are using Windows OS, always disable autorun of removable drives also keep anti virus updated .

If u must transfer data from a usb and if you already know that the usb is INFECTED, ( and you dont want to let the virus infect your PC) then follow this :

Once you plug in the USB, do not let it Auto Run. Open Windows Explorer, see that you open the USB folder from the Folders pane at the left side. Or just right click on the usb drive and click Open. This will not enable the autorun.inf file, hence avoiding the chances of spreading the virus on the PC.