I've got a couple of no-name 32Gb thumb drives. It didn't occur to me that the reason they're so cheap is probably because they're using reject components. Until tonight that is, when I found that certain files were becoming corrupt when writing to the drive.
Anyway, am I better off just throwing these out and buying reliable brands in future, or is there any way to format them to make use of the 'good' sectors? (I thought formatting was supposed to mark bad sectors as unusable)
Reliability is part of what you purchase a USB drive for, so...
If you want to play around, it is probably worth giving a low-level format of the drive a try - see if it finds any bad sectors. My guess, though, is that it isn't going bad on the drive, but in the writing to / reading from process. So, the sector may be OK, but if the connection is loose, etc., that may be the cause.
I recently had my first USB device go bad, but I shattered the USB adapter for my Logitech mouse, so I can't really blame it...
Gotta love electronics - when they work!
Marking the sectors as bad in the file system won't do it. The controller on the stick decides where things are written (wear leveling). The controller *should* be marking the bad areas and not using them. It's possible that it's not bad cells at all, but a "hacked" stick which reports a larger size than it really is. Any data written beyond the true size will be reported as corrupt. Here is a forum thread discussing it.
Marking the sectors as bad in the file system won't do it. The controller on the stick decides where things are written (wear leveling). The controller *should* be marking the bad areas and not using them. It's possible that it's not bad cells at all, but a "hacked" stick which reports a larger size than it really is. Any data written beyond the true size will be reported as corrupt. Here is a forum thread discussing it.
Ah! Interesting. Because one of the sticks reports '32Gb' capacity, but only lets me fill it up to about 8Gb (and leaves me with corrupt files at that)
Anyway, they're in the bin now. Decided to pay a few euro more for SanDisk.
If it's not too late, pull those out of the trash and recycle them at a place that recycles electronics.
Oh yeah, that's what I meant. I'll put them into the electronics bin at the dump when I'm down there next. Alternatively, I could save them some time and post directly to the e-waste mountain, c/o Bangalore, India. :)
