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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:10PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:10PM (#794520)

    Similar situation, though in my case, as I avoid like the plague the OS that is Win10, it's Win7 which mutters dark and terrible things about the USB drives, as I had nothing better to do one day I let it 'fix' the issues it alleged the 2TB portable drive had (full drive, nothing critical that wasn't backed up elsewhere), after a goodly number of hours it reported back 'no problems found'..

    I now treat this message when I see it as just another example of Windows bullshittery and ignore it.

    (yes, one day it might bite me...)

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by EEMac on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:29PM (1 child)

    by EEMac (6423) on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:29PM (#794529)

    Windows tracks whether the drive was cleanly unmounted or not. If it wasn't manually unmounted (or the computer turned off) before removal, you get the "problems with this disk" message. It doesn't necessarily mean Windows has _actually_ found a problem. It means there _could_ be a problem.

    I wish you could safely ignore the message. Unfortunately, the only way to tell the different between a real problem and a fake one is to let Windows check. :-|

    • (Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:56PM

      by Absolutely.Geek (5328) on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:56PM (#794725)

      I always ignore this message; simply because if the drive was unmounted improperly and some files were corrupted; what is Windows going to do? magic up some data that is missing and put it back in...I realise some stuff has built in redundancy and may be able to be repaired but most files don't.

      I have had this happen a few times over the years; so I always unmount drives these days. Nothing worse then coming back from site where you took a backup and it is corrupted; expecially if the site is hours away and they don't have the ability to email the files.

      I really don't need Windows spending a long f'n time scanning a drive to either
      a) say no problem found
      b) say corrupt files found and they cant be fixed
      c) corrupt the drive

      --
      Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.