I'm going to avoid using same brand/model USB sticks
All of my last three USB sticks have been the Kingston DataTraveler, and I'm satisfied with them, but I think as I buy more USB sticks over time, I should avoid buying the same brand and model, especially for sticks I run Linux off of. I discovered my BIOS doesn't distinguish between two of them (they're both listed as "Kingston DataT", while the third is a slight variant that it identifies as "Kingston DT101"), so when I check the boot order to make sure it will look first for the stick I put my operating system on, I can't tell which "DataT" is which. The only way to be sure is to unplug the two other sticks and plug them back in later.
Anyway, I could sidestep this little problem by buying different brands and models of sticks or at least buying a different brand for the stick I now keep my OS on; so I guess my next stick won't be a Kingston DataTraveler. |
Or label them? And since there is no question here (maybe you forgot to ask?) such a message may be better off in your personal LQ web log.
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Hi there,
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Once they're plugged in, I don't need to see that mark anyway, because during formatting I gave them different volume labels. [X] Doc CPU |
Marking the drives is a good idea -- volume labelling does not work as it's not seem by the BIOS which just reports the manufacturer name, at least in my experience.
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Hi there,
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You're right, of course, that this is not recognized at BIOS level before booting. [X] Doc CPU |
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As for the suggestions that I physically mark or label my sticks, this isn't about the need to physically identify them--they do look different. (Kingston color-codes different memory sizes in the DataTraveler series and my third stick is an older DT model made of aluminum.) The problem I discovered was that my BIOS editor doesn't distinguish between certain ones (if only because it truncates the names to "Kingston DataT"), and I was thinking I could avoid this by not buying the same sticks. |
Blogging serves a different purpose. There is also a difference between a personal blog and a technical blog. So you could always start a personal blog over at a dedicated blogging site. :)
As for using a different brand of usb stick for your OS, that's possibly a wise choice. It's irritating that the bios doesn't read labels but that's just the way it is. :sigh: |
Hi there,
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What am I missing? Quote:
[X] Doc CPU |
add udev rules for the thumb drives
there are a ton of attributes that can be used to identify a drive The Arch wiki is a good source of info for any distro you are using https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._a_normal_user or label the partitions on them if it is just a storage thumb drive one partition is fine label it and us the uuid in fstab as the identifier for mounting Code:
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Hi there,
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I hadn't thought of that because I never leave them plugged in longer than absolutely necessary Quote:
[X] Doc CPU |
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I guess you treat your sticks as people used to treat floppy disks, inserting them only whenever you want to access them; I treat them like small hard drives. Not because I think it's better to, but mostly because I haven't used floppy disks in about ten years, started using USB sticks only last year, and am used to using only an ever-present hard drive every day. (Until recently, when I learned how to put a Linux OS on a stick. My hard drive happened to be failing just then, so I let it die, and now use only sticks.) |
Hi there,
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But that's not the reason for my unplugging them soon after use (I also used to leave floppy disks in the drive for days, though with the heads lifted off). The real reason is that I often had (and still have) to do with computers where USB ports are limited and thus precious resources. Some of the computers I occasionally work with have only four or even only two USB ports. You'll understand that under these conditions I don't want to "waste" ports when I don't need the device plugged in. And yes, that habit still kicks in, even if a PC has 8 or ten USB ports available. Plus, I still don't trust those USB flash memories in terms of reliability. I already had to discard two of them after a few years because of an alarming increase of errors - countless files being saved were corrupted. [X] Doc CPU |
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asking for trouble here but
in the last 13 years i have had ZERO drives go bad and fail I do have a 12 year old drive with more than a few bad sectors , but it is 12 years old . my brother-in-law has had 2 go bad in that time One of them i had him put in the freezer so he could access it for the last time personally i would NOT leave a thumb drive in all the time Now a 3 or 4 TB usb drive yes but thumb drives are "portable" and basically the "new" floppy/cd/dvd |
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