Question USB flash media - performance and reliability

[mikeymikec]

This is just weird. One day short of a year since my last Treamgroup reliability update, and it had been working flawlessly until today.

I plugged it in to sync a backup, same as always, and it showed there was about 1.8GB worth of files changed that hadn't been. I ran Check Disk and it found nothing wrong, so I decided to format it and start the backup over, then see if the same problem persists. It's still just an experiment, not a storage device I need to rely upon.

It really shouldn't have exhausted the write cycle limit yet, if it has any remotely modern level of wear leveling, as the typical backup data size was under 1GB and it had around 40GB of free space still. I had a 2nd flash drive as a parallel 2nd copy of same data and confirmed it is the Teamgorup flash drive, not the files source.

Anyone know of a more comprehensive test for flash drives, besides just copying some files and doing checksum comparisons? I'd have thought Check Disk would have found problems but it didn't.

I've been selling memory sticks to customers as part of a light backup system (which is based on robocopy). If the memory stick had a FAT32 file system and a time zone change had occurred (like the one that recently occurred), it would throw the backup system off and a load of old data would be re-backed-up.

In robocopy there's a command switch to make it more aware of such changes, but the tactic I ended up using was to change the file system on the memory stick.

Could your problem be that?

 

[mindless1]

^ Thanks but no, is exFat formatted and all files much older than the time change, no overlap there. The back app was FreeFileSync.

I've tried it a couple more times and it works as expected again, though I've only done one 4GB file copy & checksum test and it didn't corrupt that. I did completely fill it when brand new to make sure it wasn't a faux-capacity drive, with no corruption then.

 

[mindless1]

I've continued to put that Teamgroup C145 128GB in the backup rotation, and it has not had any more errors or other questionable behavior since.

I expected it to implode close to a year ago, but it keeps going for now...