Flash Drives Need LEDs
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My flash drive is probably worth more than my laptop. I don’t spend much on my laptops, but I wouldn’t want to be forced to spend enormous hours repeating my work lost since my last backup of my thumb drive.
The flash thumb stick’s memory could get destroyed if someone pulls the drive out of its slot at the wrong moment. The interruption of electricity at the wrong instant of time can kill the flash. (Much the same applies to flashing a BIOS, which has similar technology at far higher prices, so it comes with warnings.) If the computer is still writing to the flash thumb drive or pen drive when someone tugs it out, it’s not just that unsaved work is lost, the entire flash and everything on it can become forever unreadable. It’s happened. (Some firms say they can recover the data, but that’s expensive and I think it may not always succeed.) So, when we want to pull a flash drive, we need to know if access is still going on. Your operating system may not tell you that, or it may tell you that it’s done before it’s actually done, and in that case whether the fault is with the OS or the drive is something I don’t know. The icon on the screen may be irrelevant.
What’s helpful is that the flash drive’s LED tells you if access is underway. Sometimes, the LED is on, or blinking, when it should be off. Sometimes the operating system, after an eject or unmount (umount) command, tells you that pulling the drive is safe when the LED is still blinking, and you have to wait until the LED stops blinking. If you can’t get it to turn off any other way, the sleep or hibernate command or a warm or cold reboot will, in my experience, do the trick. A logoff from the computer or the computer’s user account (not from a website seen in a browser), may also work, depending on how the computer is set up. If necessary, use the shutdown command to power down completely, wait for the shutdown or halt command to be completed, and only then pull the drive.
Dim LEDs are annoying, but at least the LEDs are visible. It’s on you to remember that the LED is there even though it’s hard to see.
The LED lowers the risk. It’s impressively cheaper to buy a flash drive with an LED than to recover your data because you didn’t have the LED. Manufacturers that don’t include LEDs may charge less but likely enjoy selling more flash drives every week. Don’t use a flash that doesn’t have an LED.
I searched suppliers (I’m not sure if they’re manufacturers, importers, or otherwise suppliers to retailers). Mostly, LEDs are not provided. A retailer might list an LED but if the higher-level supplier’s website doesn’t say the model has an LED then I assume the model does not have an LED and the retailer is wrong, perhaps out of date. Even the original packaging might list an LED but if the supplier’s website doesn’t mention it then I assume the packaging is wrong, perhaps outdated, too. Hopefully, I chose the more reputable brands, and maybe they’re more reliable. Among the websites I searched were those of HP, Kingston, Lexar, PNY, Samsung, SanDisk, Silicon Power, Transcend, and Verbatim without finding any model with an LED except as identified below.
I FOUND THREE MODELS. The newest model is by Kingston and is in three capacities, with an LED. It’s the Kingston DataTraveler Max USB flash drive. They come in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities. I got the smallest one. A review is below. No other DataTraveler models qualify. No other Kingston models qualify.
I like the Kingston DataTraveler Max, 256GB, Type-A, so far. (This review was written beginning .) I bought two and used each only a little. So far, they work. And it has the LED that shows writing.
But I’m puzzled by Kingston mostly not telling customers about it on its website. I’ve suggested it to them, but they haven’t done it, as of when I last checked. (Maybe it’s on packaging now. I can’t check that.) Maybe the feature is not reliable. Maybe they don’t want customers wanting the feature. I like the LED. I wonder why they don’t mention it for writing.
The drives are physically a bit wider. So, on my 4-port USB hub, if I plug this pen drive in, there isn’t room to use all the USB ports. That’s inconvenient, but not crucial, because I can add another hub to the first, or use one with more physical space between the ports. (Maybe someone makes a jack with USB ports on different sides.)
The Max as inserted may be too heavy to stay without support. If unsupported, it may fall out. It likely would be fine if I used the laptop on a table, so the Max could rest on the table, but I use it on my lap, and then if the Max can't rest on anything, it may fall out of the port. This means it sometimes becomes loose in the port and therefore has an unreliable hardware connection. That could cause power loss during writing, endangering your data, and you chose it to protect your data, so be sure to support its weight.
The nominal capacity of the smallest thumb drive of the model being 256GB, and although Kingston cautions that actual capacity may be a little lower, the actual capacity may be a bit higher. Even after formatting for NTFS, the capacity is 256.1 GB. That’s thoughtful of Kingston. The usual practice of various manufacturers is to leave us less and blame the formatting, but this time Kingston gave us a small surplus, so we don’t start out feeling compromised. I don’t know if the resulting capacity would be above 256GB for all formats. I wasn’t careful in measuring the size of what was preloaded, whether it was about 0.5 MB or about 75 MB, but it doesn’t matter, since I didn’t want the preload and reformatting still left me with all the space I paid for. The preloaded software needn’t be kept; it was /System Volume Information/ containing files IndexerVolumeGuid & WPSettings.dat, probably related to Microsoft Windows and, I think, not needed for other operaing systems, such as Apple's macOS and Linux.
Formatting may be slow. It took about seven and a half hours on my Fedora Linux 38 platform, a Dell Latitude E4310 laptop. But I didn’t have to watch it. I started the process and walked away until it was done. I think I turned off the screen saver, dimming, and the like, since I didn’t know if any of that could interfere with formatting, and kept it fed with AC power. Overnight while sleeping is good timing for that.
Mounting is a step separate from insertion on my Linux platform, whereas for my older thumb drives on the same platform mounting is included in insertion.
Data writing is fast. I didn’t measure it, but I do similar tasks with various thumb flash drives, including old ones, and this one has speeds for writing and deleting that are good.
The LED’s blink rate for writing is slower than I’m used to on other flash drives, but rapid enough to know it’s for writing. Some flashes have a much slower rate for when its identification string is being read and I don’t remember if this drive has that, too, but that’s only when the drive is being mounted or in the moment after mounting, not later, so it’s not confusing.
Unplugging the drive the right way, so you don’t destroy the drive and lose all the data on it, involves two steps, not just one, at least in Fedora Linux. With other drives, I click the icon for that, or maybe use an Eject command. But, with this drive, first I click the icon for Unmount, according to the icon’s tooltip. Then, via the context menu (for most users that’s the right-click menu), I select Safely Remove Drive. Then, with either drive, I wait for Linux to send me a popup at the desktop’s top saying it’s okay to remove. Then, I check that the LED is not flashing or lit. Then it’s okay to pull it out. (If I’m about to power down, I’ll wait till the whole machine is entirely off and then pull it out, but that’s probably more caution than necessary.)
Some curious conflicts came up. The Kingston DataTraveler Elite G2 64GB, an older model with the writing LED but no longer offered by Kingston, seems to conflict with the Max. Plugging both into an E4310 with Fedora Linux can result in not mounting one and lack of power to both through the hub or jack. And the Max may conflict with unupdated Fedora 35 Linux Workstation on my Dell Latitude E4310 that’s #2 in my fleet, hubless or jackless, because plugging the Max in twice caused the computer to shut down.
The model is also available with a Type-C connector. By mistake, I bought one, then later bought an adapter. I’m not sure that’s quite the same thing as a native Type-A drive, all else equal.
The predecessor G2 had problems that I hope don’t apply to the Max. I had two G2s; one ran hotter and slower than the other, although not too slowly; but the heat might presage a shorter life and a shorter data life. The problem did not seem to depend on which of the laptop’s built-in USB ports I used, so a design fault is suspected. The other problem was that the G2’s connector dust caps broke on both specimens, a problem I solved with generic USB dust caps I bought online. It’s annoying and, since it happened twice on the only two specimens I got, it’s likely a design problem, but we can hope that Kingston found out about it and solved it.
If I needed another pen drive now, I’d likely buy this model, the Max. I’d buy it new. I don’t believe in buying used thumb drives.
The other two are by Transcend and are the Transcend JetFlash 750 and the Transcend JetFlash 760. The JetFlash 750 comes in 16, 32, and 64 GB capacities, while the JetFlash 760 comes in 32, 64, and 128 GB capacities. No other JetFlash models qualify. No other Transcend models qualify. I tried one (perhaps more than one since I did get the brand long ago but I don’t remember which model that was). This time, I got a JetFlash 760 with the 64GB capacity. The capacity of the 64GB model is really 60.5 GB, at least when formatted for MS-DOS or NTFS. Inserting the drive into the USB port can be a bit uncertain; if the drive does not seem to work properly, push the slider so the connector is all the way into the USB port. By comparison to the Kingston (above), the Transcend for reading or writing is awfully slow. When reading about 2.38 GB for 28,772 items on the same platform, the Kingston took about 1–2 minutes while the Transcend took about 15 minutes. For writing 28,807 items, the Transcend took about 26 minutes. When I used shift-delete to try to irrecoverably delete through overwriting, it took about 29 minutes. The slowness on a Linux platform is partly due to caching of data to be written and I don’t know if any Linux distro allows the user to stop the writing from the cache so the drive can be yanked without sometimes harming the drive hardware. The Transcend’s LED is much easier to see than Kingston’s, and that’s nice, but we should be concerned that Transcend’s packaging doesn’t mention the LED, which may mean that Transcend plans to drop the LED soon without notice. When the LED is steadily on, that likely means that the drive is getting electricity, whereas blinking means writing is going on, and writing is critical for avoiding damage by the user to the drive; we could argue whether having the LED show the power status is helpful or a distraction. The hole for tying on a tag (like for your name) requires bending through a right angle, which is okay for soft thread but difficult for a hard tie. Overall, especially for what’s critical, the Transcend model is far worse than the Kingston model.
Across all the major brands I searched, these were the only models. I did not consider models from minor or unknown brands and that are apparently sold as toys or as promotional premiums with whatever logos customers want, as I expect those would have shorter lives. The point of an LED being longer life, these risky brands are not worth the money, even when cheap.
