Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776382

by JabavuAdams • 16 years ago

11 23 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm wondering how much of my info I should entrust to memory sticks. I'm curious to hear first-hand failure accounts.

Also, if the answer is "no", that would be interesting too.

lotusleaf1987• 16 years ago

I have used dozens over the last few years and none of them have failed. Granted some of the cheapo 512 MB ones I got for free at work I only used a dozen or so times before I lost them, so I don't know how long they would have held up if I used them over and over again over a long period of time. But I had a Lacie XTreme Key I used for everything daily from work, school, library and it never failed. I lost it before it failed, so I guess I am more of a threat to my data than the memory stick.

joe_bleau• 16 years ago

I've had one failure on an old 256MB Sandisk--after a few years it would corrupt files. Probably just worn out, as it got used quite a bit.

We buy really cheap 1 and 2GB flash drives at work for promotional handouts. I'd say maybe 4-8 out of every 100 are DOA and need to be returned. Don't know if the good ones are holding up a year or two later.

I recently received a new (Lexar?) drive and it would work fine until I got a few hundred MB on it, and then I started seeing corrupt files and other weird errors. I should try and RMA it.

QuantumGood• 16 years ago

Had two fail. And also have broken two. Use Dropbox instead where possible.

gdl• 16 years ago

I have a 4GB Sony (I think) that I bought a few years ago. It has always corrupted bits of data here and there (think a few dozen lines of random noise in the middle of some code) so I pretty quickly learned not to use it for most things. It now holds mp3s for my car, which fails much more gracefully with garbled input than a compiler does.

But it was cheap and relatively high capacity for its time, so I wouldn't take much from that other than "you get what you pay for".

PilotPirx• 16 years ago

yes, I had an 8GB cheap stick (15 euro) that failed after some time. uploading worked for the firs 4gb or so, everything above that ended with an file size of zero or corrupted data.

lukesandberg• 16 years ago

I was doing some low level tech support for an on campus group during college. I set up a simple samba network share for everyone to trade documents on and then set up a really simple backup system. (daily diffs burned to cd, weekly full copies on an external moved off site).

However I couldn't convince one of the departments to use it. Their manager insisted that it was insecure (since i, as admin, would have access to their data). so instead they traded data back and forth on 2 flash drives.

Needless to say, one day they lost a ton of work on one of the drives and i was told to recover the data....

i don't do tech support anymore...

T-R• 16 years ago

I had a 2GB Sony drive fail on me right as I was about to back it up. Worked on one machine, took it out, plugged it into another machine and it was dead.

AdamTReineke• 16 years ago

I've had two fail on me over the years. One is a 1GB stick that only shows some weird size that reformatting won't even fix, and the other was a 2GB that completely died. After finding Dropbox though, I no longer carry a flash drive unless I'm giving a presentation and want a backup in case the internet is down.

rdw20101009• 16 years ago

I recently bought a 16GB Corsair Padlock2 secure memory stick, and the first unit was DOA. I did a RMA, and the replacement has been fine. I think that the first got damaged during shipping.

I had also bought a 4GB PNY memory stick a few months ago that would corrupt data. I detected it because I was PGP-encrypting the contents, but the signature would not verify upon copying to another machine. I tried several times, then reformatted several times, then tried a few more times before returning the stick for a replacement (in-store return this time).

I have had about a dozen sticks otherwise that seem to work perfectly, but I don't really trust them. I also use Dropbox (love, love, love it), several external USB drives, and a NAS for backups.

Zev• 16 years ago

Does losing them count as a failure? If so, a lot have failed on me.

If not, never had one outright fail. At most, I've had a USB slow down transfer speeds once. But, I could still get all of my data off of it.

Murkin• 16 years ago

We had dozens fail.

Than again, I worked on developing embedded USB stacks. Those guys suffered quite a workload (but nothing astronomical).

Mainly: Random data corruption (~90%) Electrical failure - not responding to reset or power-on (~10%)

Dylan16807• 16 years ago

I've had a few break in the sense of wires/chips physically losing a proper connection, but that's a matter of holding it just so while you get your data off. Nothing worse yet.

motters• 16 years ago

So far over the last 5 years I've never had a USB stick drive fail.

quantumhobbit• 16 years ago

I've never had one fail. I've even sent one through the washer and dryer. Its casing fell off, but wedging the bare circuit board into the USB port still worked.

IslandCastaway2• 16 years ago

I still have and use my first $49 256mb sandisk. Never had any issues. I now use a 8g U3 sandisk daily for 100% of my tasks. I live on portable apps.

The closest thing to an issue is I have noticed the total storage size has decreased a tiny bit, but this is supposed to be normal. After all with my email client alone I am doing 1000's of overrights and stuff.

Another thing is to always remember to eject the device properly. I have had corruption of files that way, but never any damage to the drive. I backup weekly.

Flash drives are a god send. I cant imagine carrying around compact disks anymore.

IslandCastaway2• 16 years ago

...also, I own 10 various brands and sizes of flash drives, all work perfect.

jfischoff• 16 years ago

Yes had a one gb fail.

ax0n• 16 years ago

Plenty of them. One startup I worked at had hundreds of cluster machines booting from USB drives. I'd say one or two failed every month. They were Kingston brand, too. But they got a lot of use (read and write) and there were literally hundreds of them going at a time.

It goes without saying: back up your data. Never trust your data to be stored in just one location.

Mode of failure varied, but it usually manifested itself in the form of a corrupt filesystem. A few wouldn't even show up as a device when plugged in.

cmontgomeryb• 16 years ago

I had a 2GB one back when 2GB was huge, it's symptoms were odd: You could write to it, and the OS would appear to write fine, but all that would show were files called "00000000", which contained only huge amount of "0" characters. If you looked at the drive size specifically in Windows, it reported 16TB (yes terra, not a typo :P) but Linux still reported 2GB.

Aside from that, I have a story similar to joe_bleau's (and probably many other people). The company I work for buys them in bulk, branded with our company logos and containing promo material. They fail fairly regularly - good enough to get the material to clients, but not good for use after that! Terrible - but it's worth bearing in mind that they're the cheapest the marketing guys could find.

On the positive side I have a Kingston DataTraveler that I think I've had for 4 years, maybe 3. It is used all day, every day and hasn't missed a beat. I've recommended them to family and never heard of any problems.

The important thing to take from this is that if you buy quality, failures are rare - but try to never have only one copy of important data!

chesspro• 16 years ago

I've had one fail after two years of use (it wouldn't show up on my mac and failed to sudo mount). I have one right now that glitches now and then. I only keep on my flash drive useful tools that come handy, although I also use it to transfer files between computers occasionally.

I never can completely trust a harddrive with important information. Just make sure you have multiple copies :)

s_m• 16 years ago

I accidentally put a USB stick in the laundry once – it worked perfectly well, despite being in hot soapy water for an hour.

esponapule• 16 years ago

Yes, several. In fact I just had a Kingston become unreadable (even though the hardware was recognized) after just one month, had to RMA it. I have another transcend 4GB that is now eternally locked and read only.

stackprotector• 16 years ago

I've been working on a full-time project to develop content for Linux LiveUSB keys.

We've seen dramatic differences between keys. The same image written to 2 different keys can produce hugely different results. My 16GB Sandisk key from Best Buy works without any problems. The cheap no-name key we acquired from a supplier has intermittent failures.

The problem appears to be with the controller in the key and not the flash memory. We were originally concerned that the wear-leveling was causing "fixed files" to migrate data between pages when writing new files to other areas of the filesystem.

So, we used the badblocks utility to write patterns to the key to exercise the flash memory and give the controller a chance to detect any bad pages. Then after we wrote the LiveUSB image we verified it against the original, and it passed.

However, after running badblocks, when doing lots of random, continuous writes we frequently see invalid data returning from the key. We assume that this is a race condition in the USB-to-flash-memory controller in the key.

The end result is that you get what you pay for. You may get away with using a cheap key, but you shouldn't trust it for all situations. A more expensive key will likely have better tested hardware that is less likely to fail when you need it most.

Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?

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