Reasons why USB thumb drives are the wrong choice

Photo: Dead Drops (Flickr)

So yesterday, the TUAW backchannel got into a heated discussion about USB thumb drives. We had just posted about why Lion Version support was not available on non-HFS+ file systems. Our debate wasn't over whether they were good or not, but rather why they were a poor choice for day-to-day work.

All of us had a number of drives around, but for the most part they are used for storing system installers, not for old-fashioned sneakernet-style file transfers. Nearly all of TUAW has moved on to some kind of cloud solution, be it Dropbox or Pogoplug or iCloud. These are all solutions that bypass any "HFS+ vs FAT, versions-support vs Windows-interoperability" issues, plus they don't have the "running apps from dmg"-like squicky feel to them.

The fact that some people still use thumb drives for live-saving work files (update: saving live to the drive instead of to disk as described here) came as a bit of a surprise to us. We were determined to come up with a list of reasons not to do this. In the end, we brainstormed a bit and turned to Twitter for further inspiration.

Our first knee-jerk reactions were the least motivational. Although several of us (and people on Twitter as well) mentioned "Aren't those drives always a bit failure-prone?", our googling indicated that the mean time between failures was relatively ~~low~~ high, and the number of supported read/write and insertion/ejection cycles surprisingly high, particularly for modern units.

So "they're not reliable" turned out to be a bit apocryphal, even for relatively cheap drives. That being said, USB thumb drives don't appear to use load leveling of any kind, and are not designed for constant read/write cycles. As one of our Twitter buddies pointed out, they are designed for file storage above all.

Instead, we focused on practical use, why thumb drives fail in the daily work process. Without further ado, here is our list of the top reasons you shouldn't be using thumb drives for directly saving your work.

Thumb drives don't integrate well into backups. Although HFS+-formatted USB sticks can and will use Lion versions and metadata, if your workflow involves saving directly to the drive and skipping your primary hard drive, you're missing out on a lot of what Time Machine can offer, especially when you go mobile. Consider updating your workflow to save to disk (in a normal work folder) and then copying to a thumb drive for transport. This way, you ensure that all file data is not just versioned but also passively brought into the normal Time Machine backup schemes.

Thumb drives don't integrate well with pockets, bags, dogs, and small children. Portable USB sticks are small. They are tremendously easy to lose or misplace. What's more, thumb drives can be inadvertently swallowed, flushed, put through the laundry, and more. If you're saving your only file copy to a thumb drive, you're putting that data at unnecessary risk -- especially if your two-year-old just learned how to flush, or you're figuring on giving your dog enough laxative to poop out the data he just licked off your desk. That's not to mention the "good friend" scenario, pointed out by one of our Twitter buddies, who reformats your stick for "some linux install tests" without your permission.

Thumb drives are physically flimsy. It's a lot easier to break the connector port by accident, losing access to all the data stored on the drive, than you might think. Their relative fragility make them a risk for anyone who relies on them for primary storage.

Thumb drives are subject to corruption. When you unplug a drive without unmounting it -- a common thoughtless mistake that many of us make -- your data could get corrupted. Combine this with a natural exclusion from backups, and a corrupted USB drive could cost you that data.

Thumb drives have low read-write speed. If you tend to engage in edit-save-edit-save cycles, writing directly to a USB stick can slow down your work a lot, especially when working with large data files like images.

Thumb drives aren't ubiquitous. Unless you're prepared to walk your drive to another location, their data doesn't naturally integrate with net-based cloud storage. And if you do use net storage, why are you using a thumb drive as a primary storage solution?

Thumb drives take up extra slots. Who amongst us have enough USB slots on their system? Every thumb drive occupies a space that could otherwise be used for external Time Machine storage or any number of other peripherals.

So that's our list of crowd-sourced reasons, beyond our instinctive knee-jerk "don't do that" response. If you want to gawk at a dizzying array of USB drives, check out the list on Engadget. Got more suggestions? Add them to the comments!

Thanks to everyone who tweeted suggestions, including (but not limited to) Arepty, Redbits Apps (for 2-year-olds learning to flush), Ed_h, Mark_Coker, Jecoffey, Biosblob, Niels_K, Dddat, DannoWatts, Endareth, Yittsv, Yboy403, JayFuerstenberg, TB10 (for load leveling), Cranies, Ech0riginal, Innoying, ChunkyGuy, JohnSea66, LMahesa, JasperJanssen, GoJohnnyBoi, GianLovesSurf, PaulRysz, Frank2Oh, StoreClock, David_Dre (for Linux friends), Savobien, Bosh (inconsistent mount points), JTokash, DanUdey, AEberbach, MikePuchol, RJALPHAdog, Hack3rsInc, iMacDan, JohnNelm9r, WiseQuark, Zad0xsis, McElhearn, AbrahamVegh,WeatherAngel, MBrit, and everyone else!

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Source: http://www.tuaw.com/tag/opinion

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Photo: Dead Drops (Flickr) So yesterday, the TUAW backchannel got into a heated discussion about USB thumb drives. We had just...

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Paulo Santos

Wait a goddamn minute!!

You're saing that there are people who uses thumbdrives as their main storage media?

Well, sorry to hear it, but those people DESERVE to have their work corrupt/lost/stolen/[add you desired bad fate here].

September 20 2011 at 7:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Philippe Van Lieu

The problem is that people like thinking in terms of "IS" and "IS NOT". In the sense that "if it's not 'IS', then it MUST be 'IS NOT'". Just because thumb drives can't be used for EVERY occasion doesn't mean it shouldn't be used for ANY occasion. As such, they exist for a reason.

* "Thumb drives don't integrate well into backups." -- What kind of idiot would use a thumb drive for something like Time Machine or so? You could use it if you want, but that's why $130 3TB hard drives exist.

* "Thumb drives don't integrate well with pockets, bags, dogs, and small children." -- But *I* am not a pocket, bag, dog or small child. I am an adult human being.

* "Thumb drives are physically flimsy." -- So are hard drives. I've gone though like five or six different hard-drive based iPods, but I still own my first flash-based iPod Nano which is still is prime working condition after four years. Nothing is perfect, but I'd rather use a thumb drive for my traveling data because it takes to shocks and hits better than hard drives, and the transfer speed for 10+ GB projects is far quicker than cloud-based services.

* "Thumb drives are subject to corruption." -- What isn't? Maybe it'll teach people to SLOW DOWN versus foolishly quickly removing their thumb drive. (OK, I'll admit that's the best counter I have for this one.)

* "Thumb drives have low read-write speed." -- OH MAN I have to wait TEN WHOLE EXTRA SECONDS for my 250 MB Adobe InDesign file to save on my thumb drive! Whatever shall I do in that time? Maybe I should be patient?

* "Thumb drives aren't ubiquitous." -- They're far more ubiquitous if I'm dealing with customers at a location with spotty/no internet connection, or if we're--again--dealing with a project size that is far too large for cloud-services.

* "Thumb drives take up extra slots." -- That's why I eject them when I'm done with them, or why my home and office have, y'know, extra USB ports. USB 1.0 could handle 128 devices, if I recall correctly, which is nothing saying about USB 2.0 and 3.0...

......

Don't get me wrong, there are advantages and disadvantages for using every means of storing and transferring info. For small documents, sure an email or cloud-based service would be more convenient than a thumb drive! I've been doing that over FTP long before the word "cloud" meant anything other than "those white puffy things in the sky".

But not everyone works in an office that deals in small chunks of data, and that's where thumb drives come in handy. For example, 10+ GB video projects are far unwieldy to burn on a DVD-DL, extremely time consuming to upload to a cloud-based service, but they can fit quite nicely on my 32GB thumb drive. That is unless ISPs finally allow me to upload-then-download a 10+ GB video project in less time than it would take me to copy it to a thumb drive, drive 50 miles/minutes from San Francisco to San Jose and copy it to the client's computer (which I figure equates to about a 300 megabyte/sec connection).

September 11 2011 at 2:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Philippe Van Lieu's comment

Philippe Van Lieu

Y'know, I'm a dummy who can't do math. If I wanted to upload a 10+ GB project to a cloud-based service and then download it all within an hour (versus sticking it on a thumb drive, driving 50 minutes and then copying to the new home), it would have to be done over a 300+ kilobyte/sec connection for it to be convenient. Of course ISPs have reached that speed, but... maybe not all of them. I mean, there's no saying that my customer will have a mainstream ISP with consistant 300 kb/sec download speeds.

But then again many ISPs also have bandwidth caps (AT&T is apparently at 150 GB), and cloud services have a, say, 50 GB limit or so, so certain uses aren't... well, useful.

Me personally, even for small files, I'd rather stick with thumb drives. Even if downloading is a sinch, the act of manually uploading it and/or manually downloading it is not as convenient as a simple drag and drop. Maybe cloud services have allowed that these days, but.... I'm too old skool to change my ways (especially after years of doing the same with floppy disks).

September 11 2011 at 2:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

JonniKuest

you must not been paying much attention to the article. they never said "throw away all your thumb drives and only use cloud based storage!" they mentioned reasons why its not smart to use a thumb drive as your PRIMARY means of storage. i.e. Time machine. No one said that ANYONE uses a thumb drive to perform time machine backups. but rather if your file exists solely on the thumb drive, it won't be backed up by TM. etc etc. you cannot compare an iPod nano's flash storage to a thumb drive. just because they use the same technology in storage, they don't use the same connectors, and that is what erica was referring to. the ends can break off and if that happens, and the file only lives on that thumb drive, you are screwed. At the end of the day, this entire article is aimed at people who save files directly to the thumb drive and NEVER on the disk. ...pay a little more attention next time before writing a counter argument to every single point she made...

September 14 2011 at 10:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jennifer Dudley

USB drives are terrible, that's why I use the 'briefcase' drive from Lush Backup, its fantastic and syncs up all my computers. (http://www.lushbackup.com)

September 09 2011 at 2:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tommy Van Damme

This xkcd comic is a nic ecounter to this article.
http://xkcd.com/949/

September 09 2011 at 1:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Thomas Derenthal

Here's another topic: AOL sucks. Always has, always will. Hurry up and die, AOL. Here's how you can expedite the process: buy a whole bunch more blogs and bloviate-ware sites like HuffPo. The best thing that ever happened to Time-Warner was getting rid of AOL.

September 08 2011 at 7:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Thomas Derenthal

Hey! Here's an idea for a debate: how many geeks fit on the head of a pin? Really, CodeProject, this is the kind of krap you are aggregating for me? BTW, my next stop is to delete this app from my facebook.

September 08 2011 at 6:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

NatashaDelCardo

As per a recommendation in, I think, a TUAW or possibly Macworld article, I keep my financial records on thumb drives -- three of them, in case of failure. Can't get hacked like cloud, can't get stolen like computer/hard drive backup (because they are so easy to hide). I wouldn't leave my brokerage account info *anywhere* accessible.

Comments welcome.

September 08 2011 at 6:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dick Graves

Erica, do you get paid to write crap articles like this or is it more of a hobby/break from your day job/reality?

September 08 2011 at 5:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Carl

I don't know if the cloud is any more reliable than anything else.

I recently started using a new mobile broadband network (due to my old one undergoing maintenance) only to encounter an enormous number of corrupt file transfers (downloads) via the internet. Checksum errors in dmg files. Zip files failing to unzip. I haven't encountered this sort of thing for decades (not since the days of dial up via modems connected to rubber cups on telephone handles).

Painful. Especially when I'm paying a rather high rate for the bytes being transferred. I went through $150 worth of dud transfers the other day. But talk to a network supplier about it and they take no responsibility. They blame anything but their network.

September 08 2011 at 5:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

lordpeano

Sigh: Another review with out defining the requirements before the analysis.

1. Thumb drives don't integrate well into backups.: That is a problem with the OS. If I use a DVD I have the same problem every backup requires a new disk.
2.Thumb drives don't integrate well with pockets, bags, dogs, and small children: How well does a DVD integrate or HD integrate?
3. Thumb drives are physically flimsy. Compared to what ? I think they are at least as durable as a DVD or external hard d drive.
4.Thumb drives are subject to corruption. Depends on OS. Win 7 is configured for same removal. By your logic everything has a corruption problem. Power failures, Network Failures, USB HD all have similar problems.
5. Thumb drives have low read-write speed. Only valid point so far. However USB 3 will help solve the problem. Also they are faster than CD/DVD.
6. Thumb drives aren't ubiquitous. Every computer has a USB port and they can be purchased almost anywhere. So how do you define ubiquitous.
7. Thumb drives take up extra slots. All of my system have at least 6 USB ports. Your argument suggest we should be use PS2 connectors for Mice and Keyboards are well. Have you looked for USB hubs? They all a single USB port to be expanded to 4 or 6 ports. USB is designed to allow 256 devices.

September 08 2011 at 3:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

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