If you are talking about USB flash drives, they are NOT permanent 
storage.  Unlike CDs or DVDs, one good (bad) electric shock can wipe out 
all the data and ruin the drive.  I speak from painful experience.  So 
beware of the the way static builds up on your body in winter, such as 
sock feet on household carpet, and dispell the charge before you touch 
that flash drive to remove it from the computer.
Meli Diamanti

Bob Skiles wrote:
>   But, fortunately the alarmists scairt me enough a few years ago so 
> that I had all the data on them (worth keeping) transferred to new 
> media (currently I like the little USB pen-drives  ... tiny ... 
> permanent ...huge capacities ... no separate power-source necessary 
> for use ... and now affordable ... plus, HP has a free utility that'll 
> format these into either an emulated bootable floppy or bootable 
> hard-drive).
>
>