Hi. I have a charting /scanning program on home trading PC and would like to have the same on my laptop. It involves having a certain folder containing prices,etc located in PC in order for it to operate. In addtion, I would also like to have my photos located in my laptop backed up in case of drive failure. What would be the most appropriate storage device for such. I would think I would need no more than 100GB. Is the USB flash storage which looks like a key chain better than an external hard drive? The former seem to be a tad cheaper. Thanks.
Does USB flash come anywhere close to the size of 100 gb? I think it's way under that. Like 4 or something.
If you talk about reliability: no comparison whatsoever. The USB flash sticks can be pretty low cost and handy but have the reliability of something like pre-floppy disks. By all means use sticks. Don't count on them to keep your data. nononsense
I screwed up and did'nt discern the diff between GB and MB. 2GB is the max I've seen. for the sticks. Reliability is of course paramount. Thanks for the replies.
Buy a second hard disc, much cheaper, much bigger, much faster and much more reliable. Only use USB sticks for transferring data between pc's, but not as data storage.
Many reviews claim extremely high reliability for flash drives. For data file backups of up to 4GB, flash drives can be very handy. For safety, maybe make a copy on each of 2 different ones. (I make 2 copies of my stock market data file each day... one on a 2nd internal HD, one on a flash drive.)
Not sure I really understand your requirements but one (free) solution that is available is offline folders in Windows. You keep the files on your desktop and access them on the laptop via a network share but you also mark them for offline access. That means if the laptop isnt connected to the same network as the deskptop you can still access the files. If you change the files in one place (or the other) then when the laptop reconnects its automatically synchronizes the changes. This avoids you having to manual syncrhonize the files from one to the other and also gives you redundancy (since the files are actually on both hard drives) If you need a straight backup solution for static data (photos) why not just burn a CDR or DVD-R?
I've got a 80GB western digital passport, external drive. It's powered by it's USB connect....no AC power adapter needed. It's very small, and is plug and play on XP. It's the perfect middle ground between a USB flash, and a large external drive. Really great device.
Have you considered the possibility that one of your card readers might be bad and causing damage to the sticks?