Death of a Pendrive

[davidn]

By putting the laptop down badly this morning I bent the pendrive occupying its upper USB slot into a shape approximating a banana, putting a couple of years of trusty service to an end. Luckily it was still working when I went to check it in the file system, so I took the chance to ZIP the entire 4GB contents on to the little space I had left on the hard drive before I dared to remove it.

This was a very good decision, because on subsequent pluggings-in it wouldn't light up at all, though once the outer shell was broken apart with a pen to expose the insubstantial wafer of silicon beneath, it seemed healthy again. So I've swapped it with the identical drive that we use to ferry files back and forward between computers and the PS3, and the ferry will now be this thin circuit board until it dies completely and we have to get a new pendrive.

Of the masses of content that I backed up, I have been able to identify exactly three folders as having any importance whatsoever, and have restored those on to the new one - sometimes, being forced to examine what you're actually using is undoubtedly a healthy thing to do to any drive.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Why are you ferrying files back and forth to the PS3 at all? Are there things you can't network? (I haven't tried it personally, admittedly.)

[davidn]

You can - and we do have it connected to be able to get to our computers (there's a "Media Server" program that you can download, which it looks for), but very large files such as videos tend to... skip annoyingly, occasionally, especially as it needs to encode them for the PS3 on the fly. You can get around that by eliminating the wireless transfer from the arrangement.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Huh! Even though the videos are in a format that the PS3 can load when it's reading off its own drive? Sounds like the media server might be doing more work than it has to...