My most durable technological possession of all time, my USB flash drive, my SanDisk Cruzer Micro, 512 MB version (click on photo to go to the Amazon store for a better photo).I bought the flash drive in 2004 or so after my IT classmates kept joking around that I was the only one in the class still using floppy disks to transfer my work back and forth from classroom to home and vice versa.
Once I did buy it, I was really impressed with the design and abilities of the Cruzer Micro. It had nearly the capacity of a CD-R, was small enough to fit into the "key pocket" on my jeans, and even withstood the tortures of going through the wash three times and the dryer twice! I was astonished that the drive held up so well. And was behaving just fine the other day. As a matter of fact, I used the drive on Thursday at work, copying off files before I went on a service call. The drive was fully functional.
Today though, I only needed the drive once. I powered on a computer that couldn't see it's USB keyboard. It couldn't see the CyberMedics "internal store use only" USB keyboards or mice, so I thought there might be a problem with the HID (Human Interface Devices) subsystem on the computer... So I plugged in my flash drive and waited for it to be auto detected. During this process, the computer crashed. I was too focused on the customer, explaining things, when I finally decided that I should reboot the computer and run some diagnostic utilities on the system. To prevent erroneous readings, I powered the computer down and then removed the flash drive, which never was auto-detected by the computer, nor did the big bright blue LED light up on the drive either. I figured it was never detected by the computer. But when I pulled my cuzer out, it was hot. Not to the point of burning me or anything, but a good fifteen degrees or so hotter than it should have been, especially for not being detected by the system.
I decided to leave the flash drive out on the table to cool off while I troubleshooted the system further. Eventually, I decided to plug my flash drive into my g4 Mac (the "MacBench") at the store to see if it recognized. It did not. Just a quick blink of the blue LED, no mount point on the desktop, no detection by Disk Utility. A bad sign. So I let it sit for another few minutes and went back to trouble shooting the computer that started this whole mess.
Eventually, I started a hard drive diag on the computer that murdered my flash drive, and then went to plug the cruzer into a Windows Vista station we have at CyberMedics. Unfortunately, it yielded the same exact story. A quick blink of the LED, no mount point in "My Computer," no detection by Disk Management. Ditto goes for when I got the drive home on both my MacBook and SUSE Linux systems. If the drive doesn't come back by Friday, August 31, before I leave work, I'll be heading off around town to see about getting a new one.
It should be noted that I in no way fault SanDisk or the cruzer micro series of drives for this issue; in fact, I so favor the cruzer micro drives that I will lean very far toward buying only those flash drives, however, the new style just isn't the same. I've even thought about checking out Amazon and buying another cruzer 512 MB drive, same model as mine. It's price has dropped quite a bit, from the $45 I paid back in 2004 to around $12 at Amazon.
If it comes to that, I'll be writing an IT obituary for the drive this weekend.
Note: the above photo was taken shortly after the flash drive was removed from the dryer, after going through a fully cycle of laundry. It functioned for several months after ward, including going through the wash twice after this incident, and the dryer one more time. That is, until it ran into a defective computer that was putting excessive voltage though it's own USB ports, effectively killing various USB devices.
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