USB drive failure...or something worse?

[drinkingbird]

I do have industrial automation device in production and know some practical things different than theory. Moved it out of China for some reasons. I also have purchased from Amazon here in Canada fake SanDisk drives as well as fake capacity drives. Wikipedia doesn't say much about it, but it's a real thing.

I've gotten fake capacity microSD in the past, was actually very common for quite some time. That's one of those things you only buy "sold by" the reputable retailer and not some 3rd party seller. And in the case of Amazon, make sure they didn't send you a 3rd party anyway, as they sometimes combine them all in one bin.

Luckily these days it's all so cheap it isn't as worthwhile to scam.

 

[jj22038]

I know what's in theory, but I also know $0.02 cheaper component will be used in next version, and $0.02 cheaper in the one after. This is how we got to $10 drives with actual cost around $2. Using defective chips is a fact. Replacing chips with cheaper is a fact too. Most chips don't even have any markings manufactured by hard to pronounce company in China following all the standards for sure. Some brand name companies like Kingston got caught sending one drive for review and selling another cheaper and slower with the same product number. Did I mention false advertising above?

$0.02 is about right.

I started writing up a list of USB stick attributes., but it came down to one thing:

Cheap USB sticks should not be written to more than about 100 times. If you stick with that, you're fine.
IMHO.

 

[drinkingbird]

$0.02 is about right.

I started writing up a list of USB stick attributes., but it came down to one thing:

Cheap USB sticks should not be written to more than about 100 times. If you stick with that, you're fine.
IMHO.

The best are the Micro Center ones they give out free to get you in the store. They should have a warning label on them, do not put anything important on this, it is for decorative use only.

I've had good luck with genuine Sandisk microSD cards, I have dashcams in both my cars that constantly overwrite and have gotten years out of them. Samsung ones generally seem ok but after a while it seems the write speed suffers and they no longer can keep up with those cameras. Though I have a Samsung Pro that has performed very well for various uses.

The newer Sandisk USB sticks seem to be hit or miss. To get more performance (and capacity), they run pretty hot and that just leads to premature failure. But I have an old 16G Sandisk Cruzer Glide that I've been using for many years. Not the fastest but has been solid. But usually when I need to transfer something really large I just toss a large micro SD in a USB reader and do it that way.

Considering the price of NVMe SSDs these days, could put together a nice portable fairly small USB 3.2 or USB-C drive that will perform crazy fast and last virtually forever.

 

[L&LD]

@bengalih, there is no point to wait for 'fixes' to the 386.10 firmware or later to appear. It is not the firmware at fault here, it is the limited resources the RT-AC68U has to begin with. Yes, RMerlin may release a downgraded, although, 'later' firmware, specifically as a workaround for this issue (limited hardware specs), but it will be a downgrade, at least for some, no doubt.

Staying with old firmware may buy you another few months before you need to upgrade, but it won't save you from all the security issues that are fixed by running current firmware today.

Another point to consider is that the issues you're seeing with the USB drives may already be fixed with later firmware. Not all 'fixes' are labeled as such in changelogs, after all.

I understand you want to delve deeply into this issue to see its true cause, but I don't believe you ever will. Old router, cheap quality USB drives, out-of-date firmware. The writing is on the wall. Upgrades are indicated at every turn in this saga. Good luck.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm still very pro-SanDisk...

Main reason is they make their own flash in-house, and their own controllers...

Here's a SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 32GB stick torn down...

 

[sfx2000]

I understand you want to delve deeply into this issue to see its true cause, but I don't believe you ever will. Old router, cheap quality USB drives, out-of-date firmware. The writing is on the wall. Upgrades are indicated at every turn in this saga. Good luck.

I agree - there is no indication that there is some wrong with the design or implementation of the port itself - otherwise we'd see no end of requests for assistance here...

OP might have a device with issues, but I doubt that, as he reports it works for a couple of years - if there was something truly wrong with his port, it wouldn't last two days, much less two years...

All told - interesting discussion

 

[sfx2000]

The newer Sandisk USB sticks seem to be hit or miss. To get more performance (and capacity), they run pretty hot and that just leads to premature failure. But I have an old 16G Sandisk Cruzer Glide that I've been using for many years. Not the fastest but has been solid. But usually when I need to transfer something really large I just toss a large micro SD in a USB reader and do it that way.

Considering the price of NVMe SSDs these days, could put together a nice portable fairly small USB 3.2 or USB-C drive that will perform crazy fast and last virtually forever.

I've got a couple of these, and I really like them...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GTYFC37/?tag=snbforums-20

 

[drinkingbird]

I've got a couple of these, and I really like them...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GTYFC37/?tag=snbforums-20

Yeah have seen that one, nice and compact, Samsung has some good ones too. Have seen some USB NVMe enclosures that are pretty slick and compact too, just add your drive of choice.

 

[sfx2000]

Yeah have seen that one, nice and compact, Samsung has some good ones too. Have seen some USB NVMe enclosures that are pretty slick and compact too, just add your drive of choice.

Costco has the SanDisks, and usually on sale for better prices than Amazon with no waiting...

Samsung's are pretty nice as well - and like SanDisk, the vertical integration between the NAND chips and the controller is always a plus...

 

[RMerlin]

My personal experiences, having used/sold drives for close to 20 years as an IT professional:

I used to have good experiences with HP (I still have a very old Datatraveler 410 plugged into my main router, and it previously served as a bootable OS for my WDTV), I have no experience with their newer models. Got 2 or 3 very old DataTraveler USB 2.0 in a drawer that must be around 15 years old, mostly gathering dust due to their slow speed.

Corsair: bought two high performance ones (for me and my boss), and both died within a few months. Afterward I noticed that NCIX were selling refurbs of the same drive, which tells to me a high return/refurb rate on these products, and therefore scared me away from their drives...

Patriot: very solid drives so far, I carried one in my pocket on a daily basis for years for work, it lasted me for years, survived even one washer cycle. I only had to clean up the pocket lint from the plug once in a while to ensure I could insert it fully, as the plastic cap stopped staying on after a while The two replacements (different models but same brand) are still going strong after multiple years as well.

HP (was a rebranded PNY): two died within a few weeks

Sandisk: I bought a pack of 5 last year (as I wanted to keep 2 or 3 plugged permanently to some of my development routers). They got very little usage so far so I can't really comment on their reliability

 

[Tech9]

I don't trust solid state. Servers with spinning drives and server run applications. Solid state for what can be reinstalled only or with backup. I don't remember when I needed last time an USB drive to transfer something. Occasionally may use USB HDD for something larger, WD Passport.

 

[sfx2000]

I don't trust solid state. Servers with spinning drives and server run applications. Solid state for what can be reinstalled only or with backup.

Depends on the use case, and obviously the drives...

Back in 2014, I migrated from 2.5 inch SAS drives (10K spinners, fast but hot and very noisy) over to Toshiba Enterprise SSD's for one of my engineering platforms (LTE HSS) on two sites hosting a high availability oracle database - Performance was much better, reliability was better, and much less heat in the chassis.

It really depends on the vendors, use case, and perhaps risk tolerance - my operations guys questioned the wisdom of the move, but that's their job (uptime is everything for them), but after 6 months, made believers out of them.

 

[sfx2000]

Corsair: bought two high performance ones (for me and my boss), and both died within a few months. Afterward I noticed that NCIX were selling refurbs of the same drive, which tells to me a high return/refurb rate on these products, and therefore scared me away from their drives...

I went thru the same experience (just me, not my boss) - and yes, not their strongest product - great RAM I must add...

 

[Tech9]

It really depends on the vendors, use case, and perhaps risk tolerance

You know what's mine from IPv6 threads - for business it's zero. I have 3x new servers with spinning drives. We don't do raw HD video editing. In my experience HDD quality over the years improved and SSD quality deteriorated. I use SSDs at home and lost 4x already - 2x Kingston, 1x ADATA, 1x Patriot. I have 1x Kingston at 74% with nowhere near TB read/write promised. The biggest issue with SSDs - sudden death. HDDs give you warning signs.

 

[RMerlin]

Backblaze are now publishing reliability reports on their SSDs, and so far the trend seem to indicate a clearly lower failure rate on SSDs than HDDs.

The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review

Andy Klein's much anticipated 2022 SSD Midyear Drive Stats Report is here. Read on to see the findings.

www.backblaze.com

 

[Tech9]

My personal statistics - 4x dead SSDs, one on the way out and 1x only failed HDD. From flash drives - many failed SD cards including High Endurance and Industrial marketed. Motion cameras like GoPro eat them fast. USB flash drives - mostly luck, don't use them much. DRVs - WD Purple HDDs.

 

[RMerlin]

My personal statistics - 4x dead SSDs, one on the way out

That's abnormal. Everyone else's stats would contradict that, which makes me wonder if your usage scenario or the chosen brands aren't the problem.

Over the 10+ years during which I have build or sold systems using SSDs, I probably am responsible for 75-100 SSDs in various customers systems. To my knowledge, there was only two or three failures (one died within 48 hours so it was just a lemon, one was a low quality OCZ Agility, and I can't remember for sure the third one - it might have been a Samsung around the Samsung 840 days).

Personally I have gone through around 7-9 SSDs over the years in multiple desktop/laptops/mini PCs, and none of them have ever failed.

Mind you, I generally stuck to reputable brands. The majority of these SSDs were Samsungs, with a couple of OCZ in the early days (some of them were pretty good, others were pretty bad), and a few WD in the most recent years. And whatever brands were used in laptops (probably a mixture of Intel and Hynix).

 

[sfx2000]

I use SSDs at home and lost 4x already - 2x Kingston, 1x ADATA, 1x Patriot.

Interesting - I'm primarily WD/SanDisk or Samsung for either NVMe or SATA if I have a choice. My build machine has a 1TB WD Black NVME drive, so that one is probably the most write intensive one in use over here... and moving that over to an HDD was be a bit hit on build time on a CI/CD pipeline w/automation.

I've got a couple of laptops with NVMe- one is SKHynix and the other is HGST - those have no choice, as there isn't a bay to drop in a SATA (SSD or HDD).

Fingers crossed - I have had good outcomes so far with SSD...

 

[Tech9]

The two dead Kingston were purchased together, perhaps bad batch. ADATA was my first when 120GB were expensive. I never investigated the cause of failure, but I guess it was the controller for all of them. The wearing out Kingston is less than 2 years old 240GB with no much writing done on it. I have 2x identical HP laptops with NVMe drives and one was replaced under warranty, but not sure what brand they are. Windows was giving all king of errors and the laptop came back with a new drive. I do have 2x Samsung EVOs and they are good. Another HP laptop with Toshiba SSD also good. For home use I don't care much because the drives are cheap now. PCs at home do regular user data backups to a NAS. I do use SSDs for boot drives in my business, workstations. All data is on the server side. Servers don't need speedy boot, they run 24/7. Drives are mirrored and hot swappable.

 

[RMerlin]

The two dead Kingston were purchased together, perhaps bad batch. ADATA was my first when 120GB were expensive. I never investigated the cause of failure, but I guess it was the controller for all of them.

That might explain your bad experiences compared to mine - I never used Kingston or ADATA SSDs (can`t remember who manufactures their controller or their NAND).