Magnetic storage versus flash.

[Xylob]

Hey all,

I'm currently using a 2GB Maxtor hard drive as my back-up device. The fact that it's a 2GB drive should tell you that it's old as dirt.

It's S.M.A.R.T. capable and enabled, and I've run several of those 'drive health' analysis proggies on it and they all give at a green light and say that it's a long way from failure -- S.M.A.R.T. checks, read/write tests, CRC tests etc.

But it's old. Really old...

And an article published by Google some time ago showed that from their experiences, S.M.A.R.T. data is really only reliable about 30% of the time.

Plus Photoshop is always griping at me for having my "scratch" file on the same drive as my page file and sometimes the application freaks out, locks up, and does some weird flickering stuff.

I happen to have two brand new SanDisk 2GB USB U3 "smart" cruzer thumb drives laying around. http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1922)...048-A11-SanDisk ... Black.aspx

My thoughts are that I could plug one into a rear USB 2.0 port and format it as NTSF and then do one of three things:

1. use the flash drive as my back-up drive and set the 2GB hard drive as either the page file or the PS 'scratch' file while keeping the other file on my C: drive

2. keep the hard drive as the back-up and use the flash drive as either the page file or the PS 'scratch' file & keep the other file on my C: drive

3. plug both of the flash drives in and set one of each of the 2GB devices as page file, scratch file, and back-up.

I really don't know much about how flash memory works, or if/how it can fail.

Any thoughts?

TIA!