Can a USB Thumbdrive Wear Out?

The short answer would be – Yes.
In the wake of cheaper and larger capacity USB/SD/MMC Flash drives, the idea of carrying all your applications, and information with you on the go, is certainly an appealing idea.

This has also given birth to a whole generation of portable applications that will run directly from your thumbdrive. This all sounds incredibly exciting, but before we embrace this readily, it is important to note that yes, flash memory has a lifespan based on how many times it flashes or writes to the disk.

Estimations of maximum amount of disk writes range widely from 10,000 to 100,000 times based on quality of the drive. This interactive spreadsheet below gives you an idea of how long your disk would last based on usage.

To put it into context, if you just backup your data on a daily basis, you’re probably quite safe. Other culprits include full blown applications not truly meant for portable use that may write to the disk constantly and really kill your flashdisk lifespan. That said, there are a fair amount of portable applications around which work well, minimise writing to the disk, and offers a great deal of convenience. Links to sites which offer built-for-portable-devices, can be found in the section below.

All in all, there are true merits about high quality flash drives, and all of a sudden 5 year warranties for branded thumbdrives don’t seem so ridiculous anymore… so choose wisely based on your usage patterns.

Leo Nottenboom of ask-leo.com looks in detail at this subject, and you can read his full article here.

Vijay - Meditation Techniques Guide

Nice post! Really useful information on how much usage and data transfer would affect the USB thumbdrive lifespan....Keep up the great work!

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Scyleung

So if you just be normal data transfer, then a medium quality thumbdrive is going to last longer than you....

Spruceman

The big question arising from the spreadsheet is which drives are of which (low, medium, high) quality. I suspect that price alone is not the main determinant of such, as is the case for many classes of products. Any sources of "mean writes before failure" or whatever for the different brands? If so, I hope the numbers are more realistic than those old MTBFs they used to have in hard drive ads. How good are those el cheapo 8GB flash drives that MicroCenter sells for under $30?

robin c

I believe, (Not certain) that when a drive "wears out" it will become unwriteable, but reading from it will still work, so you should be able to retrieve your data and move it to a new drive. Once again, I'm not certain this is correct.

Kiltak

Most portable apps that can be stored on a flash drive aren't mission critical. Most of the time, they are tech tools that can be usefull pretty much anywhere. Who cares if the drive fails? Get another one and copy back that portable app on it!

Kiltak
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Anonymous

When flash part lifetimes are specified in terms of write cycles, it's in terms of write cycles per block, not on the flash part as a whole. Different parts can have different write-block sizes; some can be written one byte at a time, others may require 4 bytes or 16 bytes (for example) to be written at a time. Consumer products that use flash memory (like MP3 players, keychain drives, and digital camera memory cards) also include "wear leveling" write-management algorithms that spread writes out across the flash parts. The upshot is that a flash part with a 1M write rating and (say) 1M blocks will actually last for something like (1M x 1M) a trillion block writes.

And the previous anon post is correct as well; when a block goes bad, it's not the end of the device's useful life, because consumer-grade flash devices are designed to handle that situation gracefully.

The whole idea of "portable apps" is that they are designed to minimize or eliminate the number of times they write to their home directories, which are presumed to be stored in flash. There are portable versions of Firefox and Opera (for example) that in normal operation don't write to their home directories at all.

There's nothing wrong with taking care to minimize the writes to a flash storage device, but in practice it's probably not how most keychain drives will die. I bet most keychain drives will get lost, stolen, run through the washing machine, accidentally crushed in a variety of entertaining ways, or simply abandoned due to obsolescence before they go bad.

Any modern flash device should be doing bad block substitution. Thus, your drive should degrade in capacity well before it quits working altogether. Certainly all data should exist in multiple independent locations, but flash drives are pretty reliable as storage goes---especially compared to magnetic and optical media with its host of potential problems.