The Insomniac Coder

It's been a few weeks since the upgrade to SSD , and I was starting to be concerned about my external USB drives . I have two Iomega Prestige USB2 drives (one bought by my robot overlord employer, one bought for personal use). I am scared to death of single-drive data storage on laptops , because wrecking the drive not only kills your OS but also all your data. I like how in desktops and servers pretty much everyone I know tries to use multiple drives, and leaves the OS on its own. Under reasonable conditions (properly filtered power, nobody working the case over with a baseball bat, etc.) it would be extremely rare to lose more than one drive at a time. With the laptop we don't have that luxury. Since we do all of our programming work with a centralized repository, a disk failure is not a catastrophe: whatever was checked into the repository is on a much stronger server that goes through a reasonable backups regime (I pray to God). If the work was not checked in, most of ...

A few weeks ago I picked up a cheap 4GB thumb drive to have some redundancy for the only "big" drive I had, an 8GB Transcend. I don't think I spent two seconds picking it up, there were a bunch, all from similar brands, all priced the same. Now, after using the new stick a bunch of times I have come to appreciate how sometimes designers manage to lower costs while providing novel solutions to annoying problems. The Transcend stick, and almost every USB stick I have owned, has a mechanism to expose and hide the USB plug. This is to make sure that the USB connector doesn't break by accident. The problem with this is that the latch that keeps it engaged is weak, and after a few dozen times most thumb drives will become harder to connect without accidentally making the connector collapse. The new stick that I bought solves this issue pretty cleverly. Here are the two sticks in the closed position:  Now here are the same two sticks with the USB plug exposed:  Notice t...