What utility for testing usb flash drive health?

[taisingera]

I have some old flash drives and would like to see how healthy they are. I know usb flash drives are like "stupid" ssds that have no TRIM or other technologies to preserve them. Would I use this (http://www.vconsole.com/client/?page=page&id=13) or HDDScan (http://hddscan.com/) or HDTune 2.55? Or is there some other utility to test them, without writing to the drives.

 

[Dahak]

you could try vconsole usb flash drive tester

i had used it once before to check a drive and it seemed to be ok

Edit -- oh, sorry did not see the do not write to the drives.
this will do a full write to the drive

 

[taisingera]

testing a flash drive by writing to it seems counterproductive since it would use up write cycles.

 

[corkyg]

And, if you can't write to it, what can you test? It either works or it doesn't. I have often wondered why the penchant for thumb drive testing. Just have them backed up and forget about it.

 

[Blastman]

USB flash drives may not use TRIM but they do incorporate a basic wear leveling technology …

premiumusb.com

- Dynamic wear leveling. It’s the most commonly used method for custom flash drives. Data is written to free blocks of memory by rotation. These data blocks are selected based on how many write cycles each one has gone through. This technique will direct new written data to blocks used less frequently. Flash drive dynamic wear leveling is characterized by its fast write speeds.

Kingston has this in their FlashMemGuide …

kingston.pdf

Wear-Leveling Technology: Kingston Flash storage devices incorporate controllers utilizing advanced wear leveling technology, which distributes the number of P/E cycles (program/erase) across the Flash memory evenly. Wear-leveling thus extends the useful life of a Flash memory card (for details, please see Kingston Flash Cell Endurance section, next).

Considering how usb flash drives are generally used this is probably plenty good. There are industrial grade usb flash drives that spec SLC and a >1,000,000 writes but they are quite expensive compared to your standard grade consumer usb flash drive.