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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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Appalbarry on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:47AM (3 children)

    by Appalbarry (66) on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:47AM (#794387) Journal

    There's a long standing bug [launchpad.net] in Mint Linux (and I assume elsewhere) that causes USB sticks to be formatted as read-only unless you're root. First filed in 2012, still waiting for a fix.

    First time I use an USB drive since I updated to 12.04 and I found a really annoying bug on Nautilus. Nautilus claims that the destination drive is read-only when in fact it is not.

    How to reproduce:

    1. Connect a USB stick drive to your competer.
    2. The USB will appear in the desktop.
    3. Open two Nautilus windows one in your home folder, other in the USB stick drive.
    4. Select any file from your home folder (small enough to fit the free space in the USB drive)
    5. Drag the file and drop it in the USB drive window.

    -- Nautilus will say that it cannot copy the file because the destination is read only --

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:40PM (#794512)

    sudo mount -o remount, rw  /dev/sdd1

    Replace /dev/sdd1 with whatever the disk is.

  • (Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:42PM (1 child)

    by mrchew1982 (3565) on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:42PM (#794513)

    Isn't this just the OS mounting the drive in read only as a form of protection? I seem to recall that Linux defaults to read only unless you set specific flags...

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Appalbarry on Friday February 01 2019, @01:40AM

      by Appalbarry (66) on Friday February 01 2019, @01:40AM (#794823) Journal

      Expected behaviour is:

      1) Joe User sticks USB into computer.
      2) Joe User formats USB using Nautilus
      3) Joe User can now write files to the USB he formatted two minutes ago.

      Instead Joe User is told that the USB is read only, and being just Joe User, is baffled.

      In other words, it's assumed that if formats the stick, can also write to it.