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Ask Soylent: USB Flash Drives Failing

posted by martyb on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the Community dept.

messymerry writes:

Over the past year or so, I have had an alarmingly high number of USB flash drives fail into "read only" mode. Something like six or more. These varied from cheap Chinese eBay stuff to name brands pretty much equally. So, I got to thinking: How many have failed on me over the last decade or so. Practically none that I can recall. What has changed in manufacture or design that might account for this or is it just coincidental.

I did a search using Startpage, and Duck Duck Go, and didn't find anything that might validate my observations. Please tell me, am I imagining this or is it a real phenomenon? Have any of you noticed increased failure rates of USB flash drives.

There is a motivation to try to get users to migrate from external storage to the cloud. I'm not comfortable with that. I'm strictly VFR. No clouds, low, and slow.

Thanks for any insights you might choose to offer.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:55AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:55AM (#794363)

    Need more information --- are these new USB drives, or old ones? If they are old ones, maybe a flaw that only reveals itself after many years?

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:39AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:39AM (#794419)

    All the other flash drives (both usb and uSD) are optimized for block writes primarily in fat32/exfat formats.

    Using NTFS or Ext? on them degrade their performance horribly, and in my experience lead to premature failures on the order of days to hours depending on the filesystem features you have enabled (ordered write only, never allow journal mode!) The secondary issue related to this is limited write speeds.

    The Pro Endurance cards are made for both higher sustained write speeds (20mb/s) as well as longer rewritability. They cost between 2x and 4x as much as regular uSD cards however. But the benefit of them in my experience has more than made up for the cost different by eliminating lag on the RPi as its uSD storage, and allowing sustained random access on both Pi, USB adapter, and SD slot on laptops.

    Furthermore it hasn't burned out after a few days/hours to even lower levels of performance or bad blocks like the regular uSD cards can, even Samsung's own Evo line of uSD cards.

  • (Score: 1) by messymerry on Friday February 01 2019, @01:24AM

    by messymerry (6369) on Friday February 01 2019, @01:24AM (#794817)

    None of these were new. None of these were particularly old. They are not constantly connected. They are primarily for sneakernet type use. I would guess none of them had more than a hundred or so hours of use...

    ;-D

    --
    Only fools equate a PhD with a Swiss Army Knife...