Durability Issue between Flash and Disc external file storage

[Roy]

Hello group, Until now I am wondering if the much vaunted robustness
is just a false claim or indeed a reality as its contrary to my
experience:
I had 5 failed flash drives-4 from Jetflash( Transcend) and 1 from
Kingston and never had one from the standard external platter type
hard drive ever since.
I used the external drives for transferring data from other computers
to my PC.
Now I would like to ask the opinion from experts here about this
particular device
Does my experience corroborates with what others have with these
particular file storage devices?
Now another question, which is easier to recover precious data: from
these compact flash drives or from this bulky disc drives?
Do you have any DIY procedures for doing data recovery from failed
SSDS and HDDs?
TIA
Roy

 

[Roy]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:12:17 -0800 (PST), Roy

... best to send it off to professionals, other attempts at
data retrieval can cause further damage making recovery by a
professional impossible.

As for recovery with either type if you have the electronics
skills to reverse engineer and the tools to make
measurements you can troubleshoot the circuit boards to some
extent to see if you can locate a faulty component and
potentially repair it or replace the circuit board but that
would tend to be a special/unusual situation, since backups
should make it unnecessary and if the data is important
enough to bother with recovery attempts it is important
enough to pay a pro to do it.

Ultimately if I were you I would try to determine what made
the flash drives fail.  Research whether fellow owners of
the same models found them particularly failure prone
(though reports of failure on popular models may not
indicate much, a certain % of them will fail from myriad
reasons), and if not then focus on whether the OS corrupted
it, the physical port it plugs into was bad, it was wet or
physically damaged, or a power surge came over the AC mains,
or the PSU was poor quality or failing.

Thanks for that comprehensive feedback Kony!

I was analyzing the causes of those failed flash drives and they have
similar behavior that when plugged into the USB socket in the desktop
that is where the drives starts to fail.
Is there a difference in voltage with the desktop and Laptop USB
slots? Might be thinking about power difference may have been one
cause why these drives tend to fail more if used in desktops than in
laptops as based on my expereince.
One thing that I noticed at the onset of failure wa the flashing
light when the drive is plugged into the usb slot just stop and the
drive is no longer recognized.
If I checked in the my computer for any available drives connected I
can still see the removable drives but when I clicked properties
there is nothing in it or physically blank.
Its likely also that continuous bumping with the USB port may be one
reason that I am not discounting but I was expecting that it should be
robust.
I had 5 2.5inch HDD( housed in a portable enclosure) and neither of
them have failed so far and they are already 3-4 years old. I am using
the same thing for transferring larger volumes of data that is beyond
the capacity of the flash disk I have.
Meanwhile the flash drives were just barely a year old!
That is why I am starting to suspect that the claims of robustness of
this SSD is unwarranted...
They might be shockproof but they have delicate connections that a
series of bumps to the USB port can ultimately destroy it.
Other people I know have the same issue like mine...their flash drives
regardless of brands are more susceptible to failure that their
portable USB disk type drives....

I am not sure either with my limited electronic hardware skills I am
capable of retrieving the precious data from those failed pesky SSD.
Nor I would be willing to release funds for data recovery by
professionals.(Sigh, those people sometimes may exploit your
situation..... and overcharge you for such )
Might have just to reconstruct those saved information again. from
the sources ..<sigh>

Regards
Roy

 

[Joel727]

I findUSBflashdriveto be more durable/robust/etc, so
long as you don't leave them in your pants pocket so they
get wet in the wash and are plugged in while still wet
(though some are now totally waterproof), and so long as the
are not bumped while sticking out of aUSBsocket which can
break the solder joints between the PCB and the connector.

I've had fairly good luck with external drives but not as
good, keeping in mind that the external needs to have a
decent quality power supply instead of the cheap junk PSU
that comes with some enclosures, and particularly with full
3.5" sized 7200 or higher RPM drives, that the enclosure has
a fan to keepdrivetemps lower.  Even then, in ideal
situations there still seems to be a higher % of hard drives
that fail, and if used long enough practically all of them
will while in a backup scenario it is pretty unlikely you
would exceed the write cycle limitations offlashmemory.

I perferflashmemory for data sets that are small enough
that it's affordable, but it has to be kept in mind that
mostflashthumbdrives have data retention ratings of
roughly 10 years, though you can't expect a harddriveto
last that long either so optical media becomes the preferred
solution for longest term backups, or magnetic tape storage
assuming you'll be able to find or still have a working
compatible tapedrivemany years later.

Withflashdrives on the other hand you have no moving parts
to wear out (except a write lock switch in some models but I
prefer to avoid designs that use them), no rubber rollers or
grease to harden over time.


Depends on what failed.  A skilled technician at a data
receovery center could transplant aflashchip onto another
circuit board if any other part failed, to get data off but
that does no good if a power surge fries the memory itself.

A data recovery center also has methods of trying to pull
data off the harddrivedepending on what failed and if it
is only the enclosure rather than thedriveitself, any
resonably competent end-user can do this themselves.

The key in either scenario is do not keep only one copy of
valuable data.  For example if you have a small enough
amount of data that it will fit on a singleUSBflashdrive,
it isn't excessively expensive to buy a 2ndflashdrivefor
a duplicate backup, and/or put it on DVDs or other mediums,
though I would be very weary of making duplicate backups on
the same brand, even worse the same batch of optical media
in case it's a bad batch and all the discs are prone to
early failure.


... best to send it off to professionals, other attempts at
data retrieval can cause further damage making recovery by a
professional impossible.

As for recovery with either type if you have the electronics
skills to reverse engineer and the tools to make
measurements you can troubleshoot the circuit boards to some
extent to see if you can locate a faulty component and
potentially repair it or replace the circuit board but that
would tend to be a special/unusual situation, since backups
should make it unnecessary and if the data is important
enough to bother with recovery attempts it is important
enough to pay a pro to do it.

Ultimately if I were you I would try to determine what made
theflashdrives fail.  Research whether fellow owners of
the same models found them particularly failure prone
(though reports of failure on popular models may not
indicate much, a certain % of them will fail from myriad
reasons), and if not then focus on whether the OS corrupted
it, the physical port it plugs into was bad, it was wet or
physically damaged, or a power surge came over the AC mains,
or the PSU was poor quality or failing.

Having written this much, I reused an old computer for a
fileserver, put some mirrored arrays of hard drives in it,
and haven't lost data in many years with that being the lone
source of much of the data (much of it not valuable data so
I made no other backup of that).  Depends on how much
storage space you need, once I built a HTPC many years ago
and started ripping DVDs I found the amount of data
unmanageable any other way.

I placed my USB jump drive in a metal candle holder with a strong
magnet in the center, how do I un-magnetize my usb jump drive?