U Safe an Ultra-Stable Technology

U Safe is something known as Ultra-Stable Technology and applies to USB flash drives. For those holding sensitive data or treasured files on flash, then read on because this is something you should have. Despite this technology being out for some time, little information is published about it…so here we are. The technology provides protection against data lose or corruption of a flash drive when unplugged or accidentally powered off during data transfer. It also avoids disk corruption in the same situations.

Almost everyone has pulled out a flash drive from a USB port without “ejecting” the device from the OS and not seen problems, but there is definitely a possibility of data lose or even total lose of the drive. Ultra-Stable Technology eliminates this potential error by buffering the data during the transfer process.

First, lets break down a flash drive and it’s components. Regardless of look or structure you have four primary parts:

• Some sort of Case or Chassis
• USB interface (the USB connector)
• Controller IC (Integrated Circuit board – the green board)
• Flash memory

Now lets break down how a flash drive writes data. Every memory device has a FAT table which is a table that monitors which memory blocks have data and which are empty. When new data is being written or erased the FAT table is accessed to know where to put what. Sometimes data wants to go where old data is and the nature of flash memory will relocate the old data to make room for the new data. So we have the following:

1. FAT table finds a free block
2. Relocates old data to new block, if needed
3. Erase old data that was just moved
4. Write new data into the needed block

Knowing all this it’s now easy to understand why a flash drive can easily become corrupted. If power is lost or disconnected during any of the above 4 steps, BAMB the USB powered gadget becomes corrupted. Sometimes you can reformat the flash device, but most times you can’t and the device is ruined.

This is where U Safe or Ultra-Stable Technology kicks in. The patented technology from Netac buffers the data transfer process so that if a problem, as mentioned above, occurs you have protection. In simple terms the U Safe technology buffers the data transfer process and logically restores the FAT table and data at the moment of error to insure nothing is corrupted. This technology saves the user’s flash device from being permanently corrupted and a total lose. Of course, you will need to re-copy the data which was truncated during the power failure or disconnect.

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