{"id":6708,"date":"2014-10-29T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T07:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6708"},"modified":"2014-10-30T17:38:36","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T00:38:36","slug":"thumb-drive-how-to-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6708","title":{"rendered":"Thumb Drive How-To Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thumb_drive\" You have them. You use them. But not until you read my handy one-post guide will you really feel like you know them.
\n
\nThey’re thumb drives and they’re found everywhere. They come in a variety of interesting styles and shapes. I’m sure somewhere there’s a thumb drive museum, or at least some blue-ribbon-winning thumb drive exhibit at a county fair.<\/p>\n

So here are a few things you should know about using a thumb drive.<\/p>\n

Purchasing.<\/strong> Get a thumb drive based on its capacity. The first model I bought stored a whopping 256MB, shown in Figure 1. The drives I use today are 16GB, which is approximately 64 times the storage. I picked ’em up cheap at Costco.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. 16GB thumb drive (top) and 256MB thumb drive (bottom).<\/p><\/div>\n

I just checked Amazon and 512GB seems to be the highest capacity — and the most expensive.<\/p>\n

Inserting a Thumb Drive.<\/strong> You’d think this was easy, and it’s not. Inserting the drive is simple: Shove it into a USB port. When it doesn’t go in all the way, flip it over and try again.<\/p>\n

After inserting a thumb drive into a PC, it’s assigned a drive letter. That letter may not always be the same, therefore I recommend that you:<\/p>\n

Rename the Thumb Drive.<\/strong> Slap a new name on each of your thumb drives so that you’ll recognize them and keep them organized:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Open the Computer or My Computer window; press Win+E<\/li>\n
  2. Click the select the thumb drive. As a tip: Refer to the drive’s capacity. The value shown should be close enough to the what the label says. In Figure 2, the 256MB thumb drive is shown as Drive E.<\/li>\n
  3. Press the F2 key, which oddly enough is the Rename command in Windows.<\/li>\n
  4. Type in a new, descriptive, unique name, such as 16GB Alpha<\/code> or Pollux<\/code>.<\/li>\n
  5. Press the Enter key to lock in the new name.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"Figure

    Figure 2. The thumb drive is letter E, which it won’t always be.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Even though the drive letter may change, the name remains the same. And it helps you keep track of multiple thumb drives as well.<\/p>\n

    Formatting.<\/strong> You don’t have to format a thumb drive when you first get it. All thumb drives come pre-formatted, which is cool. Now back in the old days, all<\/em> media had to be formatted — even a hard drive. I’ll probably do a nostalgic post about that someday.<\/p>\n

    To format the drive on a PC:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Right-click the thumb drive icon in the Computer window.<\/li>\n
    2. Choose the Format command.<\/li>\n
    3. Click the Start button. Yeah, you don’t have to mess with anything else; all the settings shown in Figure 3 are fine — although you can give the drive a new name at this point.<\/li>\n
    4. When formatting is complete, you can start using the thumb drive again.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \"Figure

      Figure 3. Click the Start button to completely obliterate all data on the thumb drive.<\/p><\/div>\n

      Formatting is rather drastic as it does remove all contents. That’s fine; you shouldn’t keep things on a thumb drive that don’t have a backup copy elsewhere. Also, formatting is easier than manually erasing all the files.<\/p>\n

      Using the Thumb Drive.<\/strong> By all means, don’t save anything directly to the thumb drive! Save it to the computer’s primary storage first. Then you copy<\/em> the file(s) to the thumb drive.<\/p>\n

      My logic is this: Thumb drives can get lost, stolen damaged, and so on. They’re used for transporting information, not for primary storage. Always keep them as a backup, never as an original.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A quick-and-dirty summary of how to get the most from removable storage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-6708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6802,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6708\/revisions\/6802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}