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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.

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  • I was going to find some thread by C.S.Cameron and then noticed who asked question. :) I have seen a few post they had failures, but not sure if just random like the old days with hard drive or foppy drives. Some would last and other would not. I do not expect same life as SSD, but most users are not writing lots of data, so a flash drive should be ok in my opinion.
    – oldfred
    Feb 21, 2015 at 4:41
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    I have had a 4G Verbatim button USB fail during an Ubuntu update, but the failure was the reader electronics. Pulling the USB apart, the internal micro SD was fine. I have fried an SD card just copying a Windows user directory to it under Windows.
    – ubfan1
    Feb 21, 2015 at 6:39
  • Hardware fails sometimes with little or no warning regardless of OS. I have not seen any credible information that one OS is better then any other.
    – Panther
    Feb 21, 2015 at 7:24
  • Thanks, I guess if anyone had heard of a flash drive failing from running Linux, it would be OldFred, and most likely have it documented also.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Feb 22, 2015 at 3:00
  • User Fabby and I discussed a similar topic in Ask Ubuntu Meta last year. Maybe if you comment under one of his questions, you can get him to post an answer to your question.
    – karel
    Aug 3, 2016 at 5:11

5 Answers 5

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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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  • +1: Interesting results. A USB pendrive should not break after 1 hour or during benchmarking with `gnome-disks'. I'm thinking that there was something wrong with the Intenso sticks. Or maybe they could have been saved. See this link that shows how to analyze the problem (and in some cases to recover a drive that seems dead). - Please keep us updated with your experience :-)
    – sudodus
    Jun 22, 2020 at 9:02
  • Thank you for your input. I have had problems with SD cards failing after about 6 months. One became unusable, the other became read only and still works as a server. I recall booting it toram thinking writes are limited but reads are unlimited. I have had thumbdrives fail, but not while running Ubuntu. I think modern thumbdrives are trading size for writes.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jun 22, 2020 at 12:24
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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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Recently, My Hard Disk had a slow failure.
So, I Ran Live Ubuntu Persistent from my Sandisk 16GB.
For a week, it ran perfectly and 2 days back the OS abruptly got struck.
Restarting the device, it was not able to access the pen drive error was showing up.
Tried to Flash using mkusb in another system, and quitted during the middle of the process as it was stuck(to me) maybe the process would have been running.
This led to the brick of USBs and its inaccessible anymore.

Potential Reasons:

  1. Frequent Power Outages leading to abrupt cutoff (At least 10 times)
  2. Duplicate USB
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    @M R Vyshnav: Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure what you mean by "2)Duplicate USB", but I think we can probably add: 3)Manufacturer greed. They keep making flash drives cheaper and cheaper. I am still using the first two USB2 flash drives I bought to run Live Linux back in 2007. Write speed is ~12MB/s. Now I am lucky if a new USB3 super multi mega layer flash drive lasts six months and can write at 3MB/s.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jun 29, 2021 at 1:59
  • I meant it may be a counterfeit USB. Yes Planned Obscelescence ruining all of us. This instills the fact 'Old is Gold'. And your Old Usb speed is amazing. How much did it cost tho?
    – M R Vyshnav
    Jun 30, 2021 at 17:17
  • As I recall the 4GB was about $25, It was cheaper than my 1GB that I paid over $100 for. I bought a counterfeit flash drive once in Delhi. Packaging and drive looked perfect, but it was hollow inside. I take it with me when I travel as a reminder.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jul 1, 2021 at 1:53
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I've actually never had one fail in all the time I've been using them, which is about the last 10 years. (Whether they were NVME or traditional SSD)

The wear leveling is automatic, but it's not X number of writes as much as it is X number of total GB (or more like TB) and that doesn't mean that the drive will suddenly fail past those threshholds, it means that they're no longer under warranty.

Most of these drives are rated for more bytes than you could ever write in your life. For example, Samsung Evo Pro 1TB is warrantied to 1200TB written, and you wouldn't get there if you were blowing up a virtual machine the size of the hard drive and rebuilding it for 3-4 years. Enterprise drives (used for servers) have even more insane write thresholds... It's suffice to say most people can never even get close... BUT... if you do...

The answer is OVER-PROVISIONING! Your little drive has a certain percentage of storage (sometimes up to twice what the listed size is) that it uses to replace and correct error blocks. It basically isn't in trouble until you have run out of that. Modern SSD/NVME will even let you dedicate more space to that feature if you leave part of the drive un-formatted, but most consumer drives have at least 10%-20% extra blocks. Enterprise drives may have 50-100% more than the listed capacity. Until that threshold is reached there is zero chance of a corruption or failure related to the physical hardware.

In Ubuntu, you can get a report with:

sudo smartctl /dev/YOURDEVICEHERE -a

That will tell you something like:

...
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
...

As long as you're not burning up about 5% of that or more you're just fine.

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  • Good answer. I've had a few Flash drive failures over the past 5 years, but I think this was due to buying them from Amazon than from overuse running Ubuntu from them.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jan 2, 2023 at 12:45
  • @C.S.Cameron I can't imagine you could ever write enough by yourself to destroy one of these drives unless you're using them for editing long form videos. They have truly astounding write amounts. You just aren't going to scratch it before you replace it with something else anyway.
    – sean
    Jan 2, 2023 at 12:48
  • I bought a 128 GB flash drive from Amazon, I spent a day filling it with old PD movies It died the first time I tried to watch one of the movies. I still have all the drives I have bought from local brick-and-mortar shops working.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jan 2, 2023 at 13:32
  • I understand 3D TLC Flash drives are only good for 500 to 1000 write cycles, but they are cheap to make.
    – C.S.Cameron
    Jan 2, 2023 at 14:00
  • @C.S.Cameron I just install them in a raid on the two slots... Doesn't matter to me if one of them dies anyway. ;) It doesn't greatly increase your speed to have them in that configuration, but you are assured that if either drive bites it you're not going to have to do anything but maybe boot a live cd and type a boot line or two to get in.
    – sean
    Jan 2, 2023 at 15:00
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I'm not sure what you mean by "documented" or by "dying", but I've had several cases of running Xubuntu from USB sticks for months or more, and seeing them develop file corruption, popping up more frequent "system problem detected" dialogs, and even freezing up (no continuation possible other than pressing the hardware Reset button).

The longest-lasting one was a SanDisk Extreme 32GB, which worked for a good 1.5 years and then suddenly started showing problems after I downloaded a torrent to it - after that episode for the rest of its life it would "hiccup" and pause during every write operation every 3-4 seconds or so. I put up with it for a while but when that turned into more errors and freezes I gave up on it and moved back to an internal SSD.

Other sticks I've used recently that just started showing failures this month are Samsung Bar Plus 64GB ones, it's a little harder to tell what cumulative runtime I have on them because since 2021 I had used them mostly occasionally/sporadically, not as the main "home/media desktop", but I switched to one of them this winter as a main OS and it hasn't been more than... 3 months before I started seeing "system problem" dialogs, or failing partition-related commands saying the disk is read-only (happens a lot when flash storage starts failing, whether it's USB stick or SSD).

And, mind you, internal SSDs haven't done that great for me either, used with Ubuntu - I think all my SSDs so far have lasted me 1-3 years and then started to develop unacceptable errors and freezes and forced me to buy something else (didn't know you could sort of revive them by filling with 0s until very recently).

So I have to say I'm really surprised you don't have more reports about Ubuntu "killing" flash storage when used as the daily home/media OS, this has been my constant experience with Ubuntu+SSDs+Live USBs since 2012.

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