SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:42PM (3 children)
Not similar to the OP but why not have a rant..
A while back I was away for work and realized I had left my flash drive at home; so I went and paid FULL PRICE WTF for a 32GB USB3 sandisk flash drive.
Turns out that I didn't need it; but you always need one when you don't have one.....
So a few days later I plugged it into my laptop and it just wasn't working; connection was dropping and remounting etc.....it was a mess; I thought maybe it is a bug in the Linux USB3 driver; so I tried it on Windows; same issue. So I then assumed that obviously a dud drive; I wasn't going to drive a few hours to take it back so it sat on my desk for a month or so.
One day unthinkingly I picked it up and plugged it into a USB extender I have; it only supports USB2; the drive worked perfectly if a bit slow; I tested writing a 20GB VM image to the drive; no issue; where before anything bigger then 100MB wouldn't make it before it disconnected itself.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @01:56AM
Probably not related but... Most USB drives are already formatted, and some have a small hidden partition. The first thing I do is wipe the partitions and reformat.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @02:46AM (1 child)
USB3 is flakier than USB2, the connection is just not physically as good. Downgrading the connection to USB2 can revive a lot of USB devices. Also, it's often the port, not the device. Combine this with the RF problems and USB3 is just not a very reliable technology.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday February 01 2019, @03:52AM
A lot of the early USB3 stuff itself was also a bit flaky and didn't adhere well to the standard. Or in some cases in order to be quick on the market they weren't built using the final standard and it shows.
Same thing happened with the original USB too, a lot of the stuff pre-iMac is pretty spotty. With the iMac it had to work right because there really wasn't any other option on those.