Sunday, April 3, 2011

A science experiment

Wash and tumble two flash drives containing oodles of information, at medium temperature, then tumble dry in a gas dryer.

One of the two still works.

What conclusions can you draw?
  • Flash drives are amazing devices!
  • Washer and dryer motors do not emit much magnetism.
  • Thinking about backing up isn't quite the same as backing up. (We have a fancy external hd--did I use it?)
  • I'm an idiot.
  • 50% of flash drives can survive a trip to the laundromat.
Only the last one is questionable, and that's only because of a ridiculously small sample size.

And yes, I will use this in class tomorrow....

4 comments:

John Gale said...

Funny and right-on on the sample size, but check out the magnetism hypothesis before (or during) class tomorrow - flash drives don't store data as magnetic domains, so whatever happened to subject #1, it ain't magnetic. It might even work again after 48 hours in uncooked rice to dry out the inside.

doyle said...

Dear John,

Now I need to go read! I'll try the uncooked rice--I'm a little desperate (but amused).

Thanks for the tidbits!

cbeck said...

Straight out funny! I've got an old 64MB dell flash drive that came with my computer 10 years ago. It's been washed and dried a half dozen or so times. After all these years, it's still kicking.

I especially liked conclusion #4, as that is how I generally feel every time I am pulling my laundry out of the wash. My latest was a stick of gum left in a shirt pocket. One day, I *will* learn to check those pockets.

doyle said...

Dear cbeck,

Checking pockets falls in the same part of the brain as backing up data.

I'm beginning to suspect that something on the Y chromosome has ablated this part of the brain.