You have spoken many times about the reliability of CDs, DVDs and hard drives. What is your opinion of the reliability (longevity) of jump drives?

-- Howard Silverman

I've avoided jumping into the jump drive (some call them flash drives) fray because the answer isn't perfectly clear. But there is so much interest in this from readers, I'll give it a shot.

On the surface, a jump drive would seem to be a clear winner when compared to a hard disk. It has no moving parts and can withstand shock. Drop one and it will probably survive; your hard disk would not. I've even heard of flash drives that survived a trip through the washing machine and dryer.

But flash drives do not get perfect marks either. Some experts worry that, because of how the memory is stored, the number of read/write cycles is limited. How limited? I don't have a good answer. A lot depends on how well the flash drive is made and how good the components are.

I've seen in trade publications that some very cheap flash drives have begun using a type of memory that has an extremely low number of read and write cycles. So it's clearly a good idea to stay away from bottom-of-the-barrel flash drives.

Things seem rosier with the high-end flash drives. Kingston, the big maker and distributor of memory products, expects its flash drives to last about 10 years. I have no reason to doubt that.

My advice would be to use jump drives for short-term storage and a hard disk (properly backed up to a second hard disk) for long-term storage.

I'd be glad to have readers jump in on this one.

Would you have an idea why we on occasion hear a creaky door and a door slammed shut on our desktop PC? Sounds like the poltergeist.

--- Allen and Valerie Medlin

That sound effect is used to show that someone on your AOL instant messenger buddy list has just logged off. I think the creaky door might be when someone on your list logs on.

bhusted@ajc.com

Bill Husted writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.