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Flash drive getting hot

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occamsblade

Registered
Joined
Oct 2, 2019
I have had a habit of leaving a flash drive in a laptop in the past when it had a small hard drive and had no issues with heat, but this was years ago. I recently bought a little 10' netbook for work. I needed something super portable and the vast majority of what I usually use it for is on the web so I wasn't too worried about storage capacity when I got it. I have a tiny sandisk 32gb flash drive that I was leaving in the port with files that I might need to access during a project that I have been doing over the past couple of weeks. The other day I noted that despite the fact that I personally am not using the drive, it was getting quite hot. I know the OS can and sometimes does access drives on its own, but I would not have expected this to cause a heat issue. When I say quite hot, I am not sure it could have burnt me, but it was hot enough that I wasn't taking chances. Anyone know what might be causing it, and how to fix it short of getting a new drive (if that will fix it)? I just don't want to toss the drive if there is a simple fix.
 
It's quite likely that it's just heat transference from the netbook itself and not a usage issue. The only way to fix that would be to remove it.
 
A couple of my Flash drives get warm too. I don't worry about it, honestly. :)
 
If it is heat that is transferred to the drive, just get a short usb extender cable and plug the drive in that. Or buy a new usb drive.
 
Seems to me the tiny usb drives do get hotter than the bigger ones. Less silicon real estate to dissipate heat, whether that heat is from use or transferred from the computer.
 
If it has a metal casing then it is probably absorbing heat from the laptop itself, as others have said. Could switch to a SD \ micro SD card if the pc has the slot. Or a small 2" - 4" extension. If you can hold your fingers on it, it isn't too hot; if you can't... something actually may be wrong, and I'd stop using it.
 
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