high-speed USB flash drives...

[lost_soul]

Anybody got experience with these? How do they perform? I'm not expecting SATA 6Gb/s performance, but most standard flash/thumbdrives are brutally slow. I use them for moving OS images around and I treat them like tiny hard drives. I guess you're really not supposed to do this, because they will wear out faster by writing lots of multi-gigabyte images to them constantly. I have yet to destroy a USB flash drive though.

[jaxa]

http://slickdeals.net/f/6433790

 

I think they'll typically perform within 2x of a USB 2.0 drive. Maybe up to 100-150 MB/s.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/benchmarks,109.html

Read: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Copy-Benchmark-Images-Read,2302.html

Write: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Copy-Benchmark-Images-Write,2301.html

...

[elwing]

I bought myself a Patriot Magnum supersonic and I have to admit I'm pretty impressed, it's not on your tomshardware list through...

 

http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1081&Itemid=60

 

the price is also resonably cheap, you're looking for something not too far from 1$/GB... but it starts at 64GB...

[Anderson]

On this topic, I have a problem with a particular USB flash drive.

One time I tried to print some files from it at an office but it gave me complete hieroglyphs. The notification bar in Win 10 suggested to repair and restore it. I clicked ok, and then it removed all files with the exception of 2 folders which were unopenable and had a few Kilobytes on them.

After trying to format the drive and copy the needed files just for experimentation purposes for multiple times I ended up with similar results.

While troubleshooting and trying to format it again, right now I'm stuck with the USB flash drive in write protection mode. I tried all the guides on the internet to remove the write protection mode and it is stuck. There is no physical switch.

Current Read-only state is locked to Yes in Command Prompt when using attributes disk command in diskpart settings. Attempts to reset it failed. Still stuck to Yes.

Changed the Write Protection Registry Entry in Registry Editor to 0. No dice.

The problem with Write protection appeared when I changed the name of the device from my computer. Can this be the problem? I try to restore everything to default while formatting. The first error is "windows was unable to complete the format". Next time I try it it gives me that it's in write protection mode.

Othertimes it doesn't even see the stick, but when that happens I remove and reinsert it a couple of times and the PC sees it again.

I have 3 theories on what is the culprit:

a) excessive cold outside while I was carrying the USB flash drive;

b) physical damage to the USB flash drive that might have been caused by it falling down somewhere (though I carry it in a small bag together with my keys when travelling, is it really that sensitive?);

c) incorrectly removed the USB flash drive without using the safety eject function and forgot that I did.

 

Is the USB flash drive dead? Do I have any hope of using it or should I stop giving myself brain cancer? I thought USB's were supposed to be more reliable than Compact Disks. First time ever I had this problem with any USB stick. All other USB flash drive work on this and other computers as I have tried so the problem is definitely something related with the stick.

Edited January 25, 2020 by Anderson

[Swiggy]

.

Edited February 28, 2020 by Swiggy

[Anderson]

On 1/27/2020 at 5:06 AM, Swiggy said:

USBs should be more reliable than CDs, and certainly floppies. I haven't had many dead USB flash drives but they can certainly happen.

Back in the day (think XP era), Windows didn't sync after each write which meant that if you didn't use the safely eject function in Windows, you could run the risk of corruption for anything written to the drive while it was plugged in. From I think Vista onwards, Windows would disable write caching for USB drives which alleviated this problem, but kept the safely remove feature since it has another benefit - it marks the drive as cleanly unmounted. If a drive is inserted which wasn't cleanly unmounted by using safely remove, that popup to scan will appear.

If the drive is so buggered it can't properly write to it anymore, that flag might never be set and hence you'll always have the popup, plus of course the garbage files. I'd ditch the USB flash drive altogether - if it's the only one having troubles then it's specific to the drive itself and cannot be trusted anymore.

Thanks a lot for the answer.

I agree, it's probably easier to get a new USB.

I did jerk around with this one though and figured that I had to type to remove readonly in CMD and then safely remove the drive and then put it back in for the readonly to be cleared. Then it is finally cleared of write protection! When doing a check disk for errors it tells me that the USB has no errors.

However whenever trying to do something more complex in CMD like "clean" or "create partition primary" it gives me "DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
See the System Event Log for more information."

Basically it always resets back to read only write protection enabled whenever I try to do something useful to it. But it also resets readonly to enabled when checking disk for errors.

Will try to bring it back like Frankenstein back to life. I must've done something to it because it worked reliably since summer until recently. Maybe messing with the USB name did something.

Edited January 30, 2020 by Anderson