Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive?

Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?

Encryption

[xororand]

Encrypt your data to avoid such hassles in the future. Encryption makes theft or loss of your medium a non-problem, besides the lost material value.

Re:GNU Shred?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Also read TFS, though -- the issue isn't wiping the drive, it's attempting to completely reset it at a lower level than the disk blocks exposed as a linear block device.

To do that is always device-specific, which is why he's having issues.

Any brand has lemons but some just suck.

[MikeFM]

Any brand has the occasional lemon but overall WD is decent. People expect unrealistic things from hard drives too. You're talking about a device extremely sensitive to heat, moisture, vibration, and magnetism at the least and people want to cram 2TB of priceless family photos and their thesis paper into a $50 device without making backups. Yeah that's a recipe for disaster. I know - I've made the same mistake and paid for it. Lately I've been using WD Caviar Black 1TB w/ 64MB cache drives in a Drobo Elite and they've been doing pretty well but I expect to lose a couple of them per year under the stress of being in a server. Certain files I keep in RAID5 on Corsair Nova SSD drives and I use the same drives in my laptops and they've done pretty well. And of course everything is backed up to a NAS drive of which I use both WD My Book World Edition II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB in RAID1) and Drobo FS. Previously I had used a couple cheaper NAS and Firewire/USB/eSATA drives for backup but all of them died. One happened to die at the same time the main drive died which was unpleasant - both were about six months old. I think hard drive manufacturers should have to include free data restoration for the life of the warranty. The main expense of data restoration is getting exact matching parts for your drive so the manufacturer could do it MUCH cheaper and easier than anyone else. Wouldn't hurt to have a drive stop working completely, unless a jumper is switched, when it senses itself dying so it won't self destruct further. Of course if I got to pick I'd like to see standard sized PC and laptop drives come w/ two physically separate drives and RAID 1 so the drive could sense death and go into a read-only recovery mode. Data is way more valuable than hardware so every possible effort should be made to make data possible to recover. 1TB for $150 is fine with me - instead of offering me 2TB for the same price give me the built-in RAID1.

How about...

[PNutts]

Like any good developer I'm ignoring what the customer asked for and trying to figure out what they need. ;)

You want to be able to write to the card at more than 1.0 speed. Here's some random thoughts:

1. Have you tried a different reader? Fry's sells them for as little as $7.99 (Sorry, couldn't resist that one.)
2. Have you tried a different class of device? How about formatting in a camera or PDA and see if that allows you to then read/write at the faster speed on a PC.
3. Can you return or exchange it as defective? If it isn't transferring at the advertised rate then that assumption can be made. See if they can get to full speed at Fry's.
4. You didn't mention what versions of Ubuntu you tried, but is it current? How about Windows 7 or a live CD of another distro? (see #1)

Of all the ba-jillion cards out there the fact that you've had problems with two of them with the symptoms you describe makes me think the problem might be on your end. Just a guess. Either way, good luck.

Bin it and call it lesson learned.

[w0mprat]

You need to learn you lesson for patronizing vendors of cheap garbage technology.

Why did you not pay a little more for your flash drives and get something more reliable? If you want to go to the trouble of resurrecting your half-dead flash drives you can spend the $10-20 on a new one from a major brand name.

The problems you describe sound like shitty controller circuitry, that's either failing, poorly designed or quite likely both.

The lower level operations of flash are abstracted away behind the controller, with the exception of some drives theres you can't do much about it.

USB Flash drives and cards can be brought back to as-new performance by performing a write-erase pass over the entire drive. This was used to revive degraded used SSDs that would drop in performance, the TRIM feature now takes care of this on the fly. About all you can do for thumb drives and cards is to perform a single erase pass. If that doesn't work you're SOL.

Really cool new tool

[Appl]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/flashdrive

I'm really not sure why this is a question.

Don't waste your time

[Sir Holo]

If you want to use it, go buy a reliable piece of hardware.

If you want to wipe it for disposal, just hit it with a hammer.

Some things are not worth your time. Even if your time has no value.

Re:Hmm...

[ranulf]

But the point is the parent's point still holds. You *can* put any FS you wish onto the card, but there's no guarantee your data will still be there when you come to read it. For instance, a "smart" SD card might doing background erasing of sectors that are marked as empty according to the FAT so that it can achieve faster write speeds when those sectors are re-used.

Re:HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

[SanityInAnarchy]

It says at the bottom of their page that it supports flash memory through the use of card readers, so I don't see why it wouldn't work.

The main reason I'm skeptical is that this kind of stuff is, well, low-level. It can't possibly support all models of all cards, and it says nothing about what kind of flash. Could easily have been CF.

Re:dd of course

[Piranhaa]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Flash doesn't store its data in "zeros", but rather in "ones"

Read this: Undeadly Article [undeadly.org]

Go down to the part that reads:

One of the tricks you can try is erasing the flash device entirely, but you need to realize the "erased state" for flash is when it is filled with all 1's. People regularly make the mistake of filling flash based storage devices with all zeros (as is typically done with real disks) without every realizing what they are doing.