Bloody Hell! USB Drive is on Fire!

It's burning hot hot hot and it refuses to transfer.

I have a 8GB stick that I use to backup. I tried to move 7GB of data all at once onto the drive, if gives me est. time of 16min, but as it goes, the driver gets hotter and hotter and the est. time is like 120min... eventually windows starts giving me drive corrupt bubbles.

I'm sure it has to do with the drive heating up and writing slow, so is there a way to pause it, let it cool, then continue?

Thanks

btw this drive is about the size of a stick of trident gum.

 

well, it's NAND-type flash memory.... no moving parts...

self heating? brand of stick?

7MB/s.... not that bad

 

It's a Crucial Gizmo jr.


Is this normal? Are you guys able to move 7GB at once to your flash drives?

 

your computer shouldn't being that

you should be able to move any amount of data no problem.

how many different usb drives to u have on the computer? try a different one

 

I have a 8gb "pico" flash drive by super talent the same size as yours or even smaller. It gets very very hot when transferring files and it becomes very slow or even stops. The flash drive was fine when it was new, write times weren't amazing but it was decent. Now, write times are too slow which pretty much renders the drive useless.

On a side note:
I used to own a pqi 2gb flash drive that was just as tiny, but i never experienced any heat or write time issues. I'm probably gonna wait a bit and pick up a regular sized 32gb flash drive.

 

wow that's interesting...maybe smaller flsh drives have higher heats....

 

What kind of files are you transferring? If you've got hundreds/thousands of small files, then yeah, it's gonna take awhile. If we're talking big file sizes, then no, you shouldn't see 120 minute transfer times.

And if your thumbdrive is getting that hot, perhaps even to the touch, I'd say it's time for a new USB drive. Something along the lines of an OCZ Rally2. You won't have to worry about heat properties with this thumbdrive: it's wrapped entirely in an aluminum shell for good heat dissapating properties.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I have figured it out, the problem is with an encryption software that I was using. I encrypted the whole drive.

Now I reformatted without encryption, I can move all 7GB in one go, still hot, but it gets down without issues. I do have other bigger drives that you can't feel the heat. This thing is literally just a wrapped pcb board.

Encryption software is latest of Truecrypt btw.

 

I use an 8GB sandisk micro SDHC card in the small reader it came with and when transferring big files it becomes very warm as well.