Talk:USB flash drive

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USB flash drive was a Engineering and technology good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
April 25, 2006	Good article nominee	Not listed

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eUSB

eUSB redirects here, although this article currently never mentions it. Apparently this article used to mention embedded USB (eUSB),^[1] but somehow that information was lost?

^ Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson. "Building the Perfect PC". 2010. p. 147

Misleading lifespan

The article claims:

Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances (shelf storage time<ref name="wcycles">USB flash drives allow reading, writing, and erasing of data, with some allowing 1 million write/erase cycles in each cell of memory: if there were 100 uses per day, 1 million cycles could span 10,000 days or over 27 years. Some devices level the usage by auto-shifting activity to underused sections of memory.</ref>)

This makes it appear as if the average flash drive has such performance, although that is obviously not true. And readers may confuse shelf life with the actual data retention span. On optical media, for examples, those are similar. But on flash storage, data retention expiring just leads to logical errors, which occurs much earlier than physical defects, but can be postponed by refreshing the data, as described in Flash storage § Archival or long-term storage.

Nice article

Good details. Thanks. WD Bashford (talk) 20:08, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[1] Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson. "Building the Perfect PC". 2010. p. 147

[1]