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C.S.Cameron
Asked: 2015-02-21 20:29:21 +0800 CST

Lifespan a flash drive running Ubuntu?

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My question is:

Can anybody point me to a documented case of a flash drive dying from running Ubuntu?

People talk about the dangers and urge cautions, but I have researched on the internet and asked on Ubuntu Forms and have never found a single case of a (name brand) flash drive failure due to running Linux.

They say lifespan is 10000 to 100000 writes and up. With wear leveling this seems to work out to years or decades of normal use.

I am talking about Persistent and Full installs as there is no writing to disk with a Live install.

usb

3 Answers

  1. this is old experience (10 yrs) I ran into usb failures twice. It may have been the old USBs were less rugged(?). I'd assumed without finding references that several attempts writing grub to the USB's MBR had worn out the 0 (beginning) of the flash, rendering it in my case, read only. Subsequent retries lead to unreadable also. Like I stated, this is old and newer USB's may be more dependable.

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  2. I have broken:

    1 stick physically (verbatim 32GB?, plastic, PCB broken on physical bend),

    1 stick by excessive? write (intenso slim line 64GB, installed veracrypt container, stick switched to read-only after app. 1 hr. of use),

    3 sticks by benchmarking (intenso slim line 64GB, intenso premium line 32GB and 64GB, gnome-disks, benchmark disk, write benchmark, standard settings, unresponsive in first or second pass),

    none yet by running ubuntu or other linux (kali) in live mode, even with 'encrypted persistence', but that might come as I'll try it 'installed' on a 256GB sandisk ultra-fit ...

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  3. Recently, My Hard Disk had a slow failure So, Ran Live Ububtu Persistant from my Sandisk 16gb For a week, it ran perfect and 2 days back the OS abruptly got struck Restarting the device, it was not able to access the pendrive error was showing up Tried to Flash using mkusb in another system, and quitted during the middle of the process as it was struck(to me) maybe the process would have been running This lead to brick of USB and its inaccessible anymore

    Potential Reasons:

    1. Frequent Power Outage leading to abrupt cutoff (At least 10 times)
    2. Duplicate USB
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