Yes, if a USB drive is frozen it will work and will work immediately without need of defrosting it. Nerdy details below.
#2 – Will a USB flash drive survive the washing machine?
Yes, a USB flash drive will survive a washing machine; however, it is recommended to let the flash drive dry for 24 hours before trying to use it. Nerd details below.
#3 – Can a USB flash drive survive getting wet?
Yes, a USB flash drive will survive getting wet; however, it is recommended to let the flash drive dry for 24 hours before trying to use it. Nerd details below.
#4 – How long does a USB flash drive last?
Data on a USB flash drive could last forever if setup correctly and stored correctly. However the real-world answer depends on a couple things: What type of NAND flash memory? SLC, MLC or TLC and also how the device is stored between now and eternity. The nerd details are below but if you want a USB flash drive to last a realy long time you need to setup the device correct A) write protect it and you can’t leave it out in the elements B) don’t expose it to extreme tempuratures.
#5 – Why is a USB flash drive so durable?
A USB flash drive, or thumb drive, is made up of NAND memory. The unique thing about NAND memory is the ability for it to store data without elelecticty being required to flow through it.
The technical (nerdy) details about the above questions.
A quick recap about traditional storage memory. In very simply terms your computer uses a hard drive and uses RAM. The hard drive (at least the old’en days) uses a magnetic disk to store data. The magnetic platter(s) inside the hard drive hold positive and negative charges. The + and – equal the binary zero and ones – because of the charge state the hard drive could “remember” data without needing power.
Maybe you want the USB flash drive to be read-only (write protected)
Maybe you want the USB to act like a CD-ROM drive
Maybe you need to copy protect files on the drive – meaning people can view the files but they cannot print them, save them, screen capture, share, etc. The files can only be viewed.
These USB flash drives use an activity light and also provide the other cool functions mentioned above. The landing website offers six different body styles and an unlimited number of body colors along with free printing / branding if required.
Many small and portable flash drives do not have an activity light and we don’t like those types of drives. They don’t give the visual feedback we want to see.
Benefits of a Blinking LED Light on a USB Flash Drive
Data Transfer Awareness: A blinking LED lets users know data is actively being read or written. This helps prevent premature removal of the drive, which can corrupt files.
Visual Confirmation: The light confirms that the USB device is properly connected and receiving power from the host system.
Diagnostic Aid: If the LED never blinks or stays off, users can quickly determine there’s a connection or drive failure without launching Disk Management or File Explorer.
Multi-Drive Management: In environments where multiple USB drives are used at once—such as duplicator stations or kiosks—a blinking light helps identify which drives are in use versus idle.
Security Awareness: In high-security environments, a blinking light can alert users if a USB drive is unexpectedly being accessed, suggesting potential unauthorized read/write activity.
The people who write for this blog prefer a USB flash drive with an activity light. The USB manufacturers have different settings for the LED activity light. Here is a screen shot of the mass production software tool used when making a flash drive.
There are two main settings for a USB activity light:
On or Off setting for the LED on when device is ready
Blink or not when flash memory is being accessed (this is for either read or write)
In our experience any USB flash drive with an activity light will have both of the above settings to On. Meaning the LED will be a solid color when connected and ready, and will blink as the device is being accessed for either a read or write request.
The most common LED color of a flash drive is red. However, we have seen green and blue LED lights on occasion. Most flash drives can be customized with specific LED colors if required. Lead times and pricing might fluctuate depending on what is required.
Using the command prompt (cmd) you can quickly and easily get the USB volume serial number and the USB device serial number. There is no computer experienced needed to perform these functions, simply type a couple letters and you will get the information!
To get the USB Volume Serial Number do the following:
Insert USB flash drive into the computer
Double click the drive letter associated with the USB flash drive (remember the drive letter as you will need this in a moment)
In File Explorer type: cmd
From the command prompt type: vol d: and click Enter ( where “d” is the drive letter of the USB flash drive)
The command prompt window will return the results and look something like this:
The Volume in drive D is named “Nexcopy”
The Volume serial number is 3AAB-AA16
After we explain how to get the USB device serial number we will explain the difference between the two.
To get the USB Device Serial Number do the following:
If anyone searches for “burn ISO to USB” they will get pages and pages of Rufus links. However, there is a big misconception with Rufus… it doesn’t create USB CD-ROM drives! Review Rufus with us now:
The only thing Rufus does is take a bootable ISO file and write the data to a USB stick. Basically Rufus will extra the data on an ISO file and write it to the flash drive. You can do the same thing with WinRAR.
There is nothing magical about Rufus when it comes to “making a CD” because Rufus doesn’t make a “CD.”
If you need to make a USB CD-ROM flash drive the best solution found so far, is the Disc License drive. The Disc License drive is a blank USB CD-ROM flash drive. Using their Drive Wizard software (free), easily write ISO files to USB. The resultant drive will be a USB CD-ROM flash drive.
Before we get into Disc License technology, we do need to clear up some points about WinRAR and Rufus software. WinRAR will extract all the files contained in an ISO file and write them to your USB flash drive; however, if the ISO is bootable, WinRAR won’t write the boot code. This is where Rufus does shine. The Rufus software will write all the files contained in an ISO file along with the boot code to make your device bootable. With that said, there is a clear advantage for using Rufus over WinRAR.
Does Rufus burn any ISO file to USB? NO.
Does Rufus make your USB flash drive read-only, like a CD? NO.
If the ISO file isn’t bootable, there isn’t much [more] Rufus can offer. A non-bootable image will display an error message saying “This image is either non-bootable, or it uses a boot or compression method that is not supported by Rufus.”
It is not difficult to get some premium functionality from Roku TV like pause and rewind by simply adding a USB flash drive to your setup
You will need to configure the Roku TV and the flash drive to work together, but it’s not hard to do.
To get close to 90 minutes of pause or rewind time you will want to use a 16GB or larger flash drive. So using something small like a 2GB or 4GB USB drive, probably isn’t worth the effort.
The other caveat is that the pause function is only available on the live TV input, limiting you to whatever’s coming over your antenna or cable connection.
So if the above sounds like something worth trying, let us show you the way:
What you’ll need:
Roku Smart TV (not the dongle or box). Said another way, a Smart TV with the Roku app.
Live TV input (usually either antenna or cable)
Roku TV remote control (standard with Roku purchase)
A 16GB or larger flash drive. Can be either USB 2.0 or USB 3.0
Once you’ve selected your flash drive be sure nothing is on the USB stick. This process will format the drive and remove any files you have on the drive.
Getting Started
Locate a USB port on your Smart TV. Any port will work. These will be found on the back side of your Smart TV. Connect the flash drive to a USB port.
Going to your Roku home screen and move the cursor until you are highlighting the LIVE TV option. This will be a tile on the home screen.
Don’t click LIVE TV, but rather get into the Options menu of Roku. You can either click the Gear button on the Roku remote, or you can press the Home button on the remote five times.
In the Options menu select the “Set up Live TV Pause” and follow the on-screen instructions. Part of those instructions will include formatting a USB flash drive so Roku can sync with the flash memory for pause and rewind features.
Roku software will ask you to confirm the formatting process via a pin. This is only to make sure you think before you format because once you format the drive, any old data on the USB stick will be gone!
Done
Once live TV pause is enabled, you will be able to pause live television using the play/pause button on the Roku remote. You can also rewind up to (about) 90 minutes of live TV. This gives you plenty of time to have a nice family dinner while the Roku is on pause… then come back to finish the show.
This is a brilliant solution which after viewing the video you will say: “this should have come out years ago!”
This is the least expensive, yet most secure way to hold a USB flash drive in a DVD case.
The era of CD and DVD is coming to a close with USB flash drives taking its place. Yet many CD and DVD duplication facilities have shelves and shelves of DVD jewel cases which they need to put to good use. This DVD-to-USB-Insert card is the quick, easy and cheap solution. The insert allows users to keep their DVD case and related jewel case artwork to remain the same, but now secure a USB flash drive inside the DVD case, rather than an optical disc.
So many businesses enjoy the DVD case because the DVD case is a great storage box. The case is a good size with a thick spin to print what the contents in the DVD case are.
Continue this same “library” methodology with the DVD-to-USB-Insert card.
In case you can’t see, or didn’t see, the video posted above the solution will hold two USB flash drives in a DVD case. The DVD-to-USB-Insert is a thick 0.65mm clear plastic which is the same diameter as a DVD. However, the clear plastic has two rectangles which are inverted to hold just about any sized USB flash drive. This solution will fit two USB flash drives into a single DVD case. The two rectangles are the same size and as said, will fit darn nearly all USB sticks with a size that is 3″ long by 3/4″ wide and a depth of 3/8″ ( for you metric folks, that is 76mm long, 21mm wide and 9.5mm deep).
The clear plastic has a hole in the center the same size as a DVD disc and will snap into the “holder” of the DVD case. Using any DVD case on the market you can easily hold a USB flash drive inside a DVD case. The video shows how secure the USB flash drive is when inside the DVD case. The flash drive will not fall out during shipping or transit.
To be clear, the DVD-to-USB-Insert is only the clear plastic that holds the USB flash drive using the nipple snap that holds the DVD. The DVD case itself is not sold with this solution because the assumption is you (the user) already have stock or inventory of the DVD case itself.
This solution to hold a USB flash drive in a DVD case does not infringe on any patents from other manufacturers who use alternate solutions to secure a flash drive inside a DVD type case.
Please contact USB Copier for more details. This is a USB duplication service company.
CD and DVD optical duplicators have been popular for years; however, with the disc drive no longer sold in computers, the only device left for moving files around are USB flash drives – well, most common device at least. With that in mind, let us provide a USB duplicator review and our observations about them.
So what is the speed of burning a DVD compared to copying to a USB flash drive? With a 16X DVD recorder it will take about 6-7 minutes to burn an entire disc, which is 4.7GBs. A common size DVD duplicator is seven drive system which means 7 copies every 7 minutes. However, today’s file sizes are getting larger and a data load can easily be over 5GBs. A dual layer DVD is 8.5GBs and would take about 27 minutes.
The USB duplicator in this review is a sixtenn target USB 3.0 duplicator manufactured by Nexcopy. This model was selected because it was the most popular in search results, and honestly – looks best for an office setting. This system will make sixteen copies at 1GB under a minute; which translates to 16 copies in less than five minutes. The dual-layer DVD mentioned above would be 9 minutes to make 16 copies. Clearly a USB duplicator is more efficient than a DVD duplicator.
OVERVIEW
Nexcopy’s model in today’s review is the USB160PC. This is a Windows computer based software and hardware solution which runs on Windows 7 or Windows 10. The copy speeds are the same as designated standalone systems. Below is a picture of the PC based system and the standalone system, both about the same port numbering (16).
The USB160PC uses software and provides six copy modes which a company can chose which copy method is best for their needs. Copy modes are:
File Copy
Copy Add
Device Copy – Data Only
Device Copy – Full Media
IMG Copy
Unique Data Streaming
We will cover the copy modes a bit later in the review.
The Drive Manager software by Nexcopy, has a data extraction feature giving the user the ability to extract data off the drive and make a data dump to a location on the host PC.
The PC based USB duplicator is fast and flexible to work with and provides excellent user feedback during the duplication process. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) ties in the obvious information such as USB flash drive total size, bytes used, percentage done during duplication and pass/fail response. Nexcopy uses their own Drive Manager software (trademarked) and provides lifetime software support and updates for free.
The GUI does an excellent job of identifying the USB device shown in the software with the USB socket on the duplicator. This is one problem with any home-grown duplication system, like connecting flash drives to a USB hub – the only way to identify a drive is by disconnecting it until you’ve found the one in question. The USB160PC gives you the tools to quickly identify each USB drive connected.
The bonus information from Drive Manager is the second tab of the GUI. This page shows the device serial number, the VID (Vendor ID) the PID (Product ID) and device descriptor information. The tech folks will appreciate this feature.
HARDWARE
For this USB duplicator review we weighed the duplicator box and it came in just under 5 pounds – so portable! Two LED for feedback along with the GUI software. Blue LED shows power to the socket and green LED displays activity of the device (will blink when reading or writing data). The GUI will provide performance feedback and status about the copy job and process. The power supply is auto-detecting and will automatically work in a 110v or 230v environment, no need to make a manual power setting switch with the physical box. The USB duplicator has a 5v fan on the back side to provide air flow for cooling; although we didn’t experience any heat during testing and operation.
The power supply inside is a 150watt MeanWell brand power block, which is a brand used by medical companies so power will never be an issue. This also means the 150watt power supply can support 16 USB hard drives.
There are two popular methods to get large videos off your iPhone.
The most common problem is having a large video on your iPhone which you need on your computer. Email programs usually limit a file size at 20MBs, so if the file is larger, what can you do?
There are two popular options which come to mind: Use QuickTime or Use a USB flash drive.
Option #1
Use QuickTime. Macs already have QuickTime built into the OS, but Windows users must install it. Before deciding this as your best route to get large videos off your iPhone here is a list of things to consider:
You must backup your iPhone on QuickTime before you access the video
You need your computer (an authoized computer) to perform the backup
Windows user smust download and install QT
QuickTime is an invasive program which most Windows users will not like
Not a “portable” way to get the videos off your iPhone
However, this is a free solution!
Option #2
Use a flash drive.
Yes, you need to buy a specific flash drive, but after this investment it’s infinitely easier to get videos off your iPhone. Some advantages worth considering:
Get large videos off your phone without a PC
Share the videos immediately to another user’s PC
External storage device for backups of those videos
Point number one is really the value in all this {wink}.
Yes, you need to make a purchase of a product so you won’t be able to make the transfer ‘right now’ but will be able to once you have the USB device.
Specific USB drives have software which work with the iOS allowing the download of files from the phone to the drive. The one tested is the SanDisk iXpand flash drive at 128GB capacity and will cost about $40ish dollars.
We all know what ransomware is. A type of malware which threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block access to the data until a ransom is paid. Specifically, the ransomware encrypts the users data and only after the ransom has been paid will a keycode be provided to free the files.
One solution to avoid paying a ransom is restoring the computer data from a recent backup. If a company configures it’s backup software to perform a backup each night, this is a great solution to restore the original data.
However, an easier solution to avoid a ransomware attack, is make a friendly PC. A “friendly” PC means the ransomware will identify the computer as a system it should not infect. To create a friendly PC use the Windows language feature and install the Russian keyboard. When this is done (pretty much all ransomware software) will identify the computer as a friendly system and not infect it.
This language feature is available in Windows 10 and 10 Pro. We don’t believe the language option is available for Windows 10 Home edition.
Seagate offers a 40TB expansion solution which is plug-n-play. At first glance, the 40TB solution might seem like a bit much, but when broken down to more specific user experiences and demands, it might not be all that much.
To make the point, we are going to use a family of 4. Two parents and two young kids, say 2 and 5 years old.
Having two children at this age means video recording is happening on a daily bases. If it isn’t, those parents are missing out on precious moments which could be caught on film.
Using an iPhone with a video setting of 4K at 24FPS (Frames Per Second) a one minute video will eat up about 270MBs of space. If the parent takes a 4 minute video once a day for a year, that is 360GBs of data. About 1/3 of a single Terabyte of storage.
Before we continue along with how a family can easily take up 40TBs of data, also consider the Seagate solution comes with software that will automatically sync your mobile devices with the storage device. These large videos are hard to get off your iPhone unless a streaming backup service is available. Seagate provides that. We also did an article about downloading them manually with a SanDisk USB iXpand product.
Given the age of these kids, a 4 minute video is probably a bit short for whatever crazy or funny thing the kids are doing. So rounding up to 10 minutes’ worth of video per day, per parent puts the data storage consumption at about 5.5GBs per day.
Of course you can reduce the resolution from 4K down to H264, but who wants to do that? You need to edit the higher resolution video or consider that 4K in like five years from now will be low resolution.
As the kids get older, they will start adding their video to the Seagate storage solution. The example could drag on and on, but the point is this: With technology getting better each year, the storage required to save the digital content we create will expand equally.
As a closing thought; keep in mind how difficult and time consuming the process is to move data from one storage device to another, newer storage device. The 40TB expansion is a big purchase now, but the upgrade to a bigger storage device will not happen for as quickly as needed if a smaller storage device is bought.
The Empire State Building stands at a total height of 1,454 feet, with an inside space of 37 million cubic feet.
Taking the swivel USB flash drive, the #1 selling body style in the world, at a size of 57 x 19 x 10 mm in dimensions it is theoretically possible to fit 17,760,000,000,000,000 Quadrillion flash drives inside the Empire State Building.
Would this be a good conversation starter at a cocktail party?
A computer virus is something we all strive to avoid because we understand the consequences and the amount of time and energy required to restore a computer to its original condition. In a recent poll by GetUSB.info when asking users to name the top three ways a computer can get a virus, they responded with:
Link from an email
Link from an unsecure website
USB flash drive
However, if Nexcopy has anything to do with the last answer, a computer virus which spreads by USB flash drive will be a thing of the past.
Nexcopy is a US company based in Southern California who specializes in flash memory duplication equipment, printers, FDA compliant flash drives, copy protection and now a road-blocking malware on flash drives.
A virus will spread via a USB stick because the device is writable. In fact, any device that is connected to a computer which is writeable could spread a virus; other devices such as external hard drives, SD cards, microSD cards, etc. all have the same potential for harm.
But what happens when you turn these storage devices on their head and not allow them to be writable in the first place? This simple yet obvious solution is a gigantic step in the right direction for controlling the spread of a virus via USB.
The Lock License flash drive designed and manufactured by Nexcopy is exactly that. The Lock License drive is a USB stick which is always write protected. The device doesn’t care what it’s plugged into, or when, or how, the Lock License drive will always be read-only.
A virus will spread in a very specific way. A virus is designed to scan newly connected devices and ping them to see if they can spread (if the device is writable). A new device is defined by any computer system when “power” is assigned upon connection, which, coincidentally is the same time the virus will try and spread.
