USB overheats??

[Aloki]

Well, i found out today that a regular generic thumbdrive can overheat. I had a few assignments i did on it, and i forgot to take it to school, no big deal. When i got home today, I was going to save another assignment on it when it wasn't listed. I was going to try to un plug and plug it back in. It was HOT.REALLY HOT. Not hot enough to cause pain, but really close. I left it out for about 15 minutes until it cooled, and plugged it back in to see iof it would still be able to read it. so far everything is there. But i wonder if i went to my friends, if i would have set my house on fire...

BTW is it supposed to do that?

P.S. I just plugged it in, after like 2 minutes, it overheated again and disconnected. Maybe it is the port...

 

[Dtere]

They all pretty much work like that. The usb port actually 'sends power' to the drive to make it work. As with most energy inefficient electronics some of the energy is wasted in the form of heat.

I highly doubt that your thumb drive would overheat to the point that it would start a fire; not to mention they are made of plastic and metal...

I wouldn't recommend leaving the drive in there permenantly... but it is very unlikely that you will lose the information on the drive due to heat.

 

[Aloki]

That does make sense... Well i guess i should just unplug it when i am finished with it then.

 

[Rad]

I have a PNY 2.0gb stick, it never gets hot not even warm... But my sister has a 1gig "Sandisk" drive that gets hot in 20 seconds.

It gets hot even without reading/writing to it, just being on. Mine doesnt get hot when writing a full video to it, so im not sure what the difference is. But im sure the heating is normal in lower quality flash drives (Mine was 80$ that i got for 35$ because they were out of stock of 2gb drives for 35$, and the guy gave me it in its place for same price )

I just am putting a video on my flash drive and i notced that it makes my wireless mouse very laggy lol

 

[Aloki]

I think it died. It is no longer recognized...

 

[Rad]

That sucks, did it overheat or just stop working for no reason? (Like, did it break while it was plugged in)

Mine still works, and has for at least 7 months now. It cost twice as much as the cheaper version that was out of stock, but it still reads/writes slow. So maybe its built to last longer