Daily Cup of Tech

I got a very strong reminder this weekend on why it is so important (in general) to buy good quality products. My 2 GB USB drive was starting to get full and it had been about a year since I last replaced my drive so I figured that it was due to be replaced. My general rule of thumb is to spend about $100 each year on a new USB drive which will typically allow me to double the size of my USB drive each year as they definitely have a usable life span, depending on how many time you read and write to it.

Scrooge Decision

But, for some reason, last year I was feeling especially frugal (read “cheap”) when I bought my 2 GB USB drive. I saw one on sale at an online computer retailer and I promptly typed in my credit card number. When it arrived, I went through my standard process of migrating data off my old 1 GB drive to my new 2 GB drive. One of these processes was creating a 1.8 GB TrueCrypt encrypted file.

Slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w

When I started to use my 2 GB drive, I noticed a significant degradation in speed from the TrueCrypt file once it was mounted. My regular backup from my USB drive to my backup host, a process that typically took 30 seconds to a minute, depending on how much data changed on the drive since last backup was now taking up to five minutes. I was not getting to work, plugging in the USB drive, going for a cup of coffee, and then returning to start working simply because the backup was taking so long. I also noticed applications that I ran from the 2 GB drive were also running very slow, presumably because of the increased lag time in reading and writing data to the drive.

Bad Troubleshooting

Since I did not have time to truly check into the lag on the drive, I (wrongly) assumed that the problem was going from a 900 MB TrueCrypt encrypted file to a 1.8 GB file. My assumption was that there must be an exponential or logarithmic equation when it comes to encrypted file size and read/write processes. So I (gasp!) chose to live with the problem! Something I almost never do!

Better Hardware

Fast forward one year to this weekend. I headed out to buy my replacement USB drive and I remembered the speed degradation that I experienced last upgrade. I was already trying to put other strategies into place to enable me to increase the I/O speed for the TrueCrypt volume. But, I thought that I would spend a bit more money this time and see if a good quality USB drive would resolve the issue.

And, sure enough, I was amazed with how quickly the data flew back and forth from the new 3.8 GB TrueCrypt volume! It appears that it was the hardware after all. And to think the pain I endured for all those months just because I was too cheap to buy a quality USB drive!

Lessons Learned

Well, I believe that if you do something stupid and you learn from it, it can’t be all bad. So, here are some of the lessons that I learned from this experience:

1. Cheap and inexpensive are not necessarily the same. Just because I got the 2 GB USB drive for a bargain, this does not mean that I was better off financially because I paid less initially. How much did it “cost” me waiting all those extra minutes each day?
2. Never assume! I assumed that the slowdown was attributed to the increased size of the TrueCrypt volume. This was not the answer. Rather, this was a theory I had which I did not test. Had I tested it, I would probably have come to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the USB drive’s hardware and been able to return it for a refund before the warranty had expired.
3. Don’t accept poor performance. If I had only pushed a bit harder, I would have come to the realization that this was not something that I needed to accept and I would have avoided all of the frustration of waiting for the drive all of this time.
4. Do your homework. If I would have done some digging rather than thinking with my wallet, I would probably have discovered that it is better to buy a different brand of USB drive. But, I was lazy and I got caught.
5. Spend money to buy time. Money is one of those funny things that you can always get more of. Time, unfortunately, you cannot. Once you run out of time, there is no time bank that you can get a loan from. If I can spend a little more money to free up some of my limited time, it is always a deal worth making.

Drive Comparisons

If you are looking specifically at comparing flash drives, AnandTech.com has a good article (even though it is a few years old) that compares flash drive makes and models. While you are probably looking for something larger (most of the devices are 512 MB in the article), I believe that the manufacturer profiles are probably still pretty accurate and the “bigger brothers” of the same models will probably hold up well.

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