[sf-lug] USB flash (un)reliability: Re: Belated writeup of last SF-LUG meeting

[Michael Paoli]

Oh, not only such failures, but early on, don't surprise me at all.
E.g. at LUG meeting (was a while back, but not that many years),
was helping someone install linux - from USB flash.
They'd write the ISO there, boot from it, go to install and ... it would
fail ... every time.  Brand new flash - they may have even opened the
package at the meeting ... and decent name brand from reputable supplier.
Well, I assisted in isolating the problem.  Checked and ...
oh, it would go through the motions writing the flash fine.
But read it back - from the flash, not OS cache ... and the data didn't
match ... every ... single ... time.
Well, that brand new flash ... came in a two pack.  So ... tried the
other one ... and ... it worked perfectly fine.

I've also had two USB flash sticks, both under only moderate usage, fail
within the first year.

On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 1:07 PM Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:
> When I was frequently moving between a desktop and a laptop, I got the bright idea to move my whole email directory onto a USB stick or SD card (I forget which, but I think they're pretty much the same technology) and just plug it in to whichever computer I was using at the time, avoiding the need to rsync the directory back and forth all the time like I'd been doing.
>
> (And yeah, in this modern age I know 99% of people keep their email on a cloud server, but I'm frequently in places that don't have reliable net access, so I insist on keeping a local copy of my email.)
>
> That lasted maybe a week and a half, before flakiness like errors in copying started appearing. Fortunately I'd been making frequent backups because I didn't entirely trust the setup, so I didn't lose any email, but I gave up quickly on the idea of using a cheap USB stick or card as primary storage.
>
> I'm still surprised that problems happened so soon; I would have expected it to be good for at least several months. It was the first time I'd ever used cheap flash in that way, keeping it constantly mounted all day and writing to it every few minutes. Maybe I just got unlucky with that piece of hardware ... or maybe they're all crap. Anyway, based on one very small unscientific data point I agree with Rick's "not reliable enough by half".