Is my USB flash drive on the way out?

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USB flash drives are without doubt wonderful little tools. Unfortunately, they have limited lifespans--they can only perform so many write operations before they turn into ROM instead of RAM.

Now, recently it's been taking my flash drive (which I rely heavily upon for school) longer and longer to write. It takes upwards of a minute to save a ~5 MB file. Does this mean that my flash drive is starting to die? Should I replace it?

Sounds like it.

Be leery. Flash drive cells die. I had a flash drive entirely die whilst transporting data and I almost had a nervous breakdown......Where I live (extreme cold) one cannot leave a flash drive, even for moments, in a cold car, for ex. Be cautious around instrumentation (magnetic), plus temp fluctuations. Yes, back-up your data - just in case.

You people are scaring me!

I recently took my three flash drives and reformatted them all.
I was going to re-organize the information I had on all three so I pulled everything off them.
Then I went and checked each one out and my computer said they all were over 3/4 full.
I just went and reformatted them (I always reformat my new drives since I don't want all that extra stuff the seller puts on them).

I do try to backup everything.
Luckily at the computer labs at school, they allow that students to keep backup files of our work, for the semester.
I also try to keep a backup on my laptop of everything I am working on, as well as in the external hard drive I have at home as my major backup source.

I'm pretty ignorant about flash drives... I had no idea the cold up there in Fairbanks would affect a flash drive... thanks for the info!

could be the USB drive too. If you want to, go out and get another USB card and see if that doesn't solve it.

Also, know that jump drives have stuff on them nearly permanently so if you have a 1 GB one and put on 500 MB, you'll be mostly full even though you put on half it's capacity.

They are cheap, so why not get another one just to be safe? Personally, I think using SD cards are better than USB sticks.

Of course it could be that the USB drive is just heavily fragmented instead of on the way out...

Flash memory can be rewritten a huge number of times before it fails. Formatting a stick doesn't rewrite it all.

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If you have a 1Gbyte stick, there is 1GByte of space on it.

With Windows, you are only allowed a single FAT partition (I don't think it even accepts NTFS). So, if you have lots of small files, they invariably occupy a whole cluster each.

A 1Gbyte FAT16 partition can only allocate clusters that are 16Kbytes each.

Indeed, because it is FAT16, it can only have at most 65,535 files.

I.e. 65,535 files, each of one byte, will fill a 1Gbyte stick (FAT16).

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The only dead stick I've ever seen, I opened up, to discover that two surface mount resistors had dropped off (and out of the package). Bad manufacture/assembly, in other words.

avoid journalling filesystems on them to as the filesystems usally write to them after metadata changes which happens all the time.
Avoid
JFS,reiserfs,XFS,reiser4,HFS+,ext3,ext4, and NTFS

Thanks for properly informing me lau. I'll remember that.

Thanks to this thread... everytime I use my iPod... I see it dwindling away to some useless fragment of the pop culture of the 2000's