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?

Comments

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.