Cheap USB Flash Drives Suck

[muman613]

Just want to know if anyone else has had such terrible experience with modern USB flash drives. I recently purchased a bunch of them for various projects I am working on at home and already I have had one go bad for no apparent reason. The USB Flash drive I keep my music on for listening to in the car just went south on me. In my car there are two USB ports, one on the dash and one in the center divider console. I use the one in the dash to connect to my phone (for charging) or tablet (for charging). I use the one in the center divider console for the music USB flash drive. I have been using a cheap HP brand flash (of course manufactured by some Taiwanese factory) with 8G of storage... Today I opened the center console and put a package in the console and somehow it 'jiggled' the USB stick... My car then was unable to read the flash drive.

When I got home I figured I would have to do some disk diagnostics to repair it. But what I found out is that the Flash drive is trashed. When I insert it my Linux system reports that it sees a USB drive inserted but it is unable to find any data, thus no partition table, thus no partitions. I had only one FAT32 partition on the drive and it was not visible. I tried running a partition table editor and it failed. I googled to see what others have done and the ultimate answer was 'throw the bricked stick away'. So now my music collection flash drive is sitting at the bottom of my trash can...

As I said I purchased a bunch of these, varying from 2G, 8G, and even a couple 16G drives. I am now installing my music collection (about 10G presently) on this 16G stick. This new stick is made by PNY and I just hope it is more resilient than the piece of stick HP flash disk.

Anyone else have a horror story concerning these storage devices?

[IsraelForever]

I don't have a horror story, but I just want to ask you, once you figure out which is the most reliable brand to purchase, to please give us the name so we can avoid the problems you have encountered.  Losing my files and documents is not something I want to happen.  Thanks in advance!

[Zelhar]

There are allot of fake flash drives on ebay. If you got a really good deal it is probably a fake or defected product. I bought a (64gigs) ultra fast Sandisk microSD that was a fake. Try to get a refund if it is possible (it should be if you got it from ebay). Sometimes the scam is that they sell you but never deliver. More often it is a fake- they send you an old 2GB drive painted with a known brand (don't blame HP it's almost certainly a fake) with phantom file system that shows the wrong size.

First thing to do with a new flash drive is validate it's size  and specs, for example by running this (if on linux):
http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/

[angryChineseKahanist]

static? everytime I get out of my care I get a huge jolt of static.

if not, there's been many reports of cheap controllers. like zelhar said, ebay flash cards cannot be trusted.

also older flash media cannot be low level formatted. it'll just fail after a few uses.

I own brand name flash media like sandisk as well as cheap no name ones.

[Dan193]

The best thing to do is get a portable hard drive like Seagate and backup everything on there. Then use a USB stick like Sandisk or PNY to back it up on there for a 2nd backup.
That way you can always carry the portable stick with you.
If the USB stick goes bad or you lose it, you still have all the music and info on the portable hard drive.
Thats what i do.   You never know when one of these drives might go bad.  Thats why you should back it up on twice on the portable or regular size hard drive and my Sandisk USB stick.

[muman613]

Shalom,

The data (music) has been backed up and is stored on a hard-drive. The USB drive I bought at Frys Electronics new (and I still have an un-opened 8G HP flash disk right here). I don't know what I am going to do with the new one (at this time it is too much to try to return it).

I am taking the newly copied 16g drive to the car for the drive into work...

[IsraelForever]

So Sandisk is the best one to buy?  You all recommend Sandisk?

[angryChineseKahanist]

sandisk was a good brand. now its full of problems.
for example look up:
"sandisk 32gb and samsung galaxy s4"
or just "sandisk problems"
they try to blame the knock offs, but after pressure they finally admit they have problems with many of their products.
I can't recommend any particular brand. You'll have to pick something you like and look it up for problems.
do not buy the latest and greatest.

[muman613]

I should point out my music collection is 'old fashioned'. Most of the music I have I originally purchased on CDs and kept in a CD collection in my living room. But as things became more and more digital I started a project to 'rip' the entire CD collection to mp3 format and save it on a portable USB hard-drive. Now I also run a media server in my home so all wifi devices can play any music on my system (and now my new router also runs a media server which can serve from a USB flash drive)...