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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:12AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:12AM (#794425)

    I've been for the shit and giggles running an OS off a flash drive for a few years already. It's a full blown regular debian install (with the noatime mount option, something I definitely use on regular hard disks as well to minimize I/O).

    Yes, it's slow as molasses but works fine. This USB has done a lot of writes but still keeps kicking. It's a 8 GB stick. I half expected it to die in a couple of months but no.

    I would concur with others, alot new stuff is just shit quality.

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  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Friday February 01 2019, @01:50AM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Friday February 01 2019, @01:50AM (#794828)

    I use flash drives with Openwrt/LEDE. Granted they’re little OSes, I’ve been going a few years on one of those disks.