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

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: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:15AM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:15AM (#794375)

    Could your computer have a problem that's hurting them? Maybe 5V too high? Maybe something's writing to them a LOT and you don't know it? (I know that's unlikely because most have an activity LED and you'd see activity, but I had to ask).

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:00PM (1 child)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:00PM (#794542)

    Seconded. I would suspect the commonality in the failures is something they've all been plugged into, and not a manufacturing defect. I've never had a USB flash drive fail, and I have dozens.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:19PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:19PM (#794595)

      Yes, same here, lots of various FLASH drives and uses over the years, starting around 1994: SD, uSD, CompactFlash, BIOSes, PCMCIA/PC card/ExpressCard, proprietary camera cards (Sony, Olympus, etc.), Arduino/Raspberry Pi/PC104/BeagleBoard/other SBCs, on and on, and no failures here.

      Maybe messymerry has many USB FLASH drives of the same defective batch? Mine are a widespread mix of brands, etc.

      Besides +5V, maybe messymerry has an electrostatic discharge (ESD) problem?

      The only other place FLASH is vulnerable is repeated rewrites to the same cells. From the WiKi page, "USB flash drives can withstand between 10,000 to 100,000", so maybe somehow something is massively rewriting?

      More data needed to solve this one.