check the physical health of a USB stick in Linux

Question

How to check the health status of a USB stick? How do I know that a USB is broken beyand repair, or repairable?

Answer 1

It depends on the failure mode, I suppose. They're cheap for a reason.

As a USB device, watching the bus via device manager in Windows or the output of dmesg in Linux will tell you if the device is even recognized as being plugged in. If it isn't, then either the controller on board or the physical connections are broken.

If the device is recognized as being plugged in, but doesn't get identified as a disk controller (and I don't know how that could happen, but...) then the controller is shot.

If it's recognized as a disk drive, but you can't mount it, you might be able to repair it via fdisk and rewrite the partition table, then make another filesystem.

If you're looking for the equivalent of S.M.A.R.T., then you won't find it. Thumbdrive controllers are cheap. They're commodity storage, and not meant to have the normal failsafes and intelligence that modern drives have.

Answer 2

There is no way to query a USB memory stick for SMART-like parameters; I'm not aware of any memory sticks which support doing so even via publicly-available proprietary software. The best you can do is to check that you can successfully read+write to the entire device using badblocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badblocks

You want to specify one of the write tests, which will wipe all data on the stick; make a backup first.

Find the device by looking at dmesg after plugging in the USB stick; you'll see a device name (most likely sd_, ie sdc, sdd, etc.) and manufacturer information. Make sure you're using the proper device!

If the stick is formatted with a valid filesystem, you may have to unmount it first.

Example syntax, for a USB stick enumerated as /dev/sdz, outputting progress information, with a data-destructive write test and error log written to usbstick.log:

sudo badblocks -w -s -o usbstick.log /dev/sdz

You'll need to repartition and reformat the stick afterwards, assuming it passes; this test will wipe everything on the stick. Any failures indicate a failure of the device's memory controller, or it has run out of spare blocks to remap failed blocks. In that case, no area of the device can be trusted.

Answer 3

If it isn't working, it isn't fixable. It doesn't matter what OS you're using.

Answer 4

USB drives are pretty rudimentary, there's not a lot that can go wrong on them! Generally, if it shows up as a drive and you can format it then it works. You could try having a look at the Portable version of CrystalDiskInfo as that's a quick lightweight analysing tool. Very few USB sticks report back S.M.A.R.T. info and the like though.