a rare problem that resulted in a dead usb flash drive

I had a "rugged" flash drive, but mine is dead to the world.

I've only seen a flash drive have real-deal hardware failure once before what I'm about to describe. Years ago I had a 512MB (yes, megabyte) SanDisk cruzer, and beat the crap out of that thing. One day, it started rejecting any attempt to write data to it. That's a telltale sign that flash drive has reached the end of its useful life, so yep, stick a fork in it, it's done. Chucked it.

The way this rugged drive failed however... this was not only way different in the way it failed, but rare.

"Tough" flash drives mostly either have hard rubber cases (mainly for waterproofing and shock protection) with caps, or metal cases that can really take a beating. Mine had the hard rubber case thing.

What happened is that I plugged this flash drive to a computer, it detected once, seemed to work, then didn't, and that was it. Dead drive.

I should note this flash drive wasn't new. More on that in a moment.

I figured okay, the file system probably got screwed up, no big deal, just delete and recreate the file system. Pop the drive into my Linux computer, nothing. Doesn't even show up in gparted. Pop the drive into my Win11 computer, go to Disk Management. Still nothing.

When the drive was plugged into Win11, the "connected" sound happened, but all the Safe Disconnect showed was "Flash DISK" and nothing else. No media, no drive. It existed yet didn't exist at the same time.

I do some research, and something I can run in Linux is this to see what's going on:

watch "dmesg | tail -20"

I run that, watch the screen, plug in the drive, and see this:

There's that "Flash DISK" again with a nondescript "USB" listed as manufacturer. That's not normal.

After more research, what I found out is that the flash drive's controller cannot talk to the NAND chip anymore.

Now if I wanted to, I could use other software to determine who made the controller, download what's known as a mass production tool (a.k.a. mptool) software that specifically supports the controller I have, and maybe save the drive.

No, I'm not doing that. Even if I saved the drive, there's no guarantee it would ever work the same as it did before since I strongly suspect the memory on it is toast. This thing is getting chucked in the trash.

What caused this kind of flash drive hardware failure?

Not Rufus, although that software did put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. But again, not specifically Rufus's fault.

If you don't know what Rufus is, it's very handy free software used for writing bootable ISOs to flash drives. For the recent computer I just installed Win11 on, a USB stick had a bootable ISO written to using Rufus (a different one since the rugged flash drive failed).

For that rugged drive I used, it had been written to as a bootable USB several times before - but not exclusively by Rufus. In fact, the last time it was written to was using the Windows Media Creation Tool for Windows 10.

I had Rufus running, plugged in that rugged drive, tried an ISO write, and within seconds, nope, not happening. Drive is dead.

Again, this wasn't Rufus's fault. Rufus just happened to be the thing I was using at the time that ended that flash drive's life. It could have easily happened with any other ISO media creation tool.

My best guess as to what happened?

Two things. ISO writes and heat.

If I were writing things like documents or images, no problem, since those are little file writes. But when writing multi-gigabyte ISOs? Different story. That heats the flash drive right up, stays that way for a while until the writing is done and many files are written both large and small.

Neither fsck nor CHKDSK would have helped me here, because even if the flash drive was deemed "good" by either utility, the failure still would have occurred. I'm certain of that.

What usually happens with a flash drive is that when it starts to near the end of its useful life, file writes start failing (like the 512MB I mentioned above), then fail some more, then finally the drive isn't even recognized. The rugged flash drive was different. There was no warning at all and it just straight up stopped working completely.

What I've learned

Flash drives should not be trusted with anything to be saved for the long term. Thankfully, the one I had that died didn't have anything important on it. As crazy as this sounds, for long term storage, it's better to use DVDs.

Published 2025 Feb 4