Can a USB port kill a flash drive?

[tomstevens26]

OK, strange problem time....

Last week I picked up a Sandisk 256MB USB flash drive from Circuit City ($39 after MIR). Figured I might as well since I do often swap files between work and home. Had last week off so I just played around with the drive at home a few times, and also moved some data over to a friend's PC. Everything worked fine.

Yesterday morning I tried bringing some files to work. Put the drive in a USB port on my Dell docking station, it found it for the first time, loaded the drivers automatically (W2K here at work) and opened up the folder. I saw my files, but 9 out of 10 were corrupt. When trying to copy them from the flash disk to the HD it would give me a device IO error. Hmm...strange...figured it might be the PC here at work acting weird....which happens all the time....POS Dell laptop.

Got home and put the drive in my system to see what would happen. Samn dang problem. Formated the drive, copied some files to it (which appeared successful), pulled it out, and put it in my wife's PC. Same IO error message. At that point, I figured that the drive just went bad and the fact that it just quit working in my work PC at work was just strange timing. No biggie. Took the drive back to CC last night and swapped it out for a new one. Did some test copying back and forth on it between my PC and my wifes PC. Everything worked fine.

Brought it in to work again this morning and the same damned thing happened. IO error. So I can expect that when I go home this afternoon and plug it into my home PCs I'm going to get the same problem. Is it possible (I guess everything's possible...) that there could be something wrong with the USB port on this docking station that is causing it to fry these drives? I plugged my USB mouse into that port and it seems to work just fine. What the heck?? Any ideas? Is there any software to run on these flash disks to verify if there is bad memory or something in it? Can you just run a scan disk type check on it?

Thanks in advance for any help with this confusing problem!

Tom

 

[Brian48]

I think it's just a bad drive.

 

[tomstevens26]

I would think so, too, but for both of them to work perfectly until I put them in the same port? Maybe so, but it's one heck of a coincidence. Soon as I get a chance I'm going to pull one of the small 32MB drives from our stock room and try it out. If it blows that one then I'll know it's the port.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

I killed a USB wireless adapter when it was plugged into a miswired USB port, but the mouse thing tends to leave me thinking that the mouse may have more voltage tolerance than the USB key.

Or possibly I'm just babbling.

 

[tomstevens26]

Well, just tested another drive (different brand), and the test drive messed up as well. Different error this time though...instead of the IO error, I got a message "Error reading from source disk". That drive still did work in another PC though, so I'm wondering if perhaps it's more durable than the Sandisk drive I have. Time to replace this POS docking station. Oh well, been looking for a reason to get a new laptop anyway.