Beware "free" USB Flash drives

[George Macdonald]

Hmm, so I got this 128MB USB 2.0 flash drive as a freeby - came as a "combo
special" with an Athlon64 I bought from NewEgg - it's transparent green and
has a NewEgg and AMD logo on it. I used it to bring a bunch of files home
from the office to work on and first indication I got that anything was
awry was a WinZip error saying this .ZIP is a continuation of a preceding
volume in a multi-volume set... which I knew it wasn't.

WinXP's Error Check doesn't show errors or give a summary (yeah I forgot
about Event Log at first) but CHKDSK /R gave a whole bunch of msgs about
bad clusters. I tried writing a few large .ZIPs and they seemed OK then I
tried a largish (200 files or so) directory structure and it was really a
mess with CHKDSK /R. Only then did I look in the Event Log and find it was
polluted with Bad Block msgs: "The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad
block"... usual M$ informative stuff!<shrug>

Funny I'd always thought those things would either work or not at all but I
guess they're just as bad as magnetic media. The thing is I hadn't used
this thing much so I'm not sure if it was bad to start with or not...
though I suspect so. The annoying thing is that (full) Format does not
complain and the Error Checking/Check Now/"Scan for and attempt recovery of
bad sectors" and CHKDSK /R only find bad blocks if there are files stored
in the bad areas.

I guess I'l lbe running CHKDSK /R on newly created files on flash drives
for a while now.

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

Hmm, so I got this 128MB USB 2.0 flash drive as a freeby - came
as a "combo special" with an Athlon64 I bought from NewEgg - [snip]
bunch of msgs about bad clusters. I tried writing a few large
.ZIPs and they seemed OK then I tried a largish (200 files or
so) directory structure and it was really a mess with CHKDSK /R.

Funny I'd always thought those things would either work or
not at all but I guess they're just as bad as magnetic media.
The thing is I hadn't used this thing much so I'm not sure
if it was bad to start with or not... though I suspect so.

You might want to cheak your USB installation. Not all
1.0 cables will run 2.0 without [crosstalk-induced] errors.
Maybe even some of the case frontpanel cables!

I'd suggest repeated `md5sum /dev/sda` on a Linux system.
It should return the same signature. Then re-write a big file.
Please rmember that most of these devices are FAT16 at best
(FAT12 on some of the smaller ones), and these have limited
directory sizes.

Well, maybe it _is_ the device. And/or we're all
learning a nice lesson -- cheap!

-- Robert

 

[George Macdonald]

Hmm, so I got this 128MB USB 2.0 flash drive as a freeby - came
as a "combo special" with an Athlon64 I bought from NewEgg - [snip]
bunch of msgs about bad clusters. I tried writing a few large
.ZIPs and they seemed OK then I tried a largish (200 files or
so) directory structure and it was really a mess with CHKDSK /R.

Funny I'd always thought those things would either work or
not at all but I guess they're just as bad as magnetic media.
The thing is I hadn't used this thing much so I'm not sure
if it was bad to start with or not... though I suspect so.

You might want to cheak your USB installation. Not all
1.0 cables will run 2.0 without [crosstalk-induced] errors.
Maybe even some of the case frontpanel cables!

I'd suggest repeated `md5sum /dev/sda` on a Linux system.
It should return the same signature. Then re-write a big file.
Please rmember that most of these devices are FAT16 at best
(FAT12 on some of the smaller ones), and these have limited
directory sizes.

Well, maybe it _is_ the device. And/or we're all
learning a nice lesson -- cheap!

I only have three different USB drives, including this turkey, on hand here
at home but I'm pretty sure it's the device. The other two show no errors
at all and this one shows errors on every write of a large amount of data -
I generally use .ZIPped files to check integrity, same as I do for network
operation in the office. OTOH with enough files, this thing seems more
susceptible to get CHKDSK /R errors with a big directory structure - I have
one project which is 111MB, >2500 files in 75 directories that just will
not write properly at all.

BTW this utility:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/serveroptions/us/download/20306.html
which will create a bootable formatted USB drive. allows FAT, FAT32 and
NTFS formatting though NTFS is an absolute no-no for portable devices... if
you really want to port across systems.

 

[Keith]

Hmm, so I got this 128MB USB 2.0 flash drive as a freeby - came as a "combo
special" with an Athlon64 I bought from NewEgg - it's transparent green and
has a NewEgg and AMD logo on it. I used it to bring a bunch of files home
from the office to work on and first indication I got that anything was
awry was a WinZip error saying this .ZIP is a continuation of a preceding
volume in a multi-volume set... which I knew it wasn't.

WinXP's Error Check doesn't show errors or give a summary (yeah I forgot
about Event Log at first) but CHKDSK /R gave a whole bunch of msgs about
bad clusters. I tried writing a few large .ZIPs and they seemed OK then I
tried a largish (200 files or so) directory structure and it was really a
mess with CHKDSK /R. Only then did I look in the Event Log and find it was
polluted with Bad Block msgs: "The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad
block"... usual M$ informative stuff!<shrug>

My wife was just complaining over the weekend that her USB stick she uses
as backup at work was acting up. I sent her instructions to get her to
reformat it FAT32 this morning and she's been a happy camper. ;-)
Evidently it was FAT 32 before, but reformatting it made it all better.
Maybe there is a fragmentation issue going on here. I've never had a
problem (though have reformated mine) but I generally clean them off
before writing to them. Maybe just copying everything off to another
directory, erasing the stick, and copying it all back was enough?