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I bought a USB flash drive a couple of weeks ago. Today when I tried to write with Rufus the USB drive it errored out saying there was a hardware failure and when I tried again it said the disk was read-only. No matter what I did I couldn't find a way to write to the drive again. I used Rufus about 10 times on that USB flash drive. Is it normal for Rufus to destroy a USB drive so quickly or is the flash drive defective?

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    Depending on the drive and how it is written, potentially yes. I've seen many drives reported by people here over the years that do not like images being written at them and people have had problems with old and new drives from random manufacturers. It could be a defect in the controller, the flash or it could just be a fluke that you got a bad stick. It's hard to know.
    – Mokubai
    Mar 1, 2021 at 17:49
  • Being "read only" is a common failure mode of USB sticks and MicroSD cards... Our general dupe target is this question which lists various things that might help, depending on how broken it is, but in a lot of cases it comes down to the memory stick just deciding that its flash storage is not fit for use and cannot be written to and should just be thrown out.
    – Mokubai
    Mar 1, 2021 at 17:51

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Rufus does not use any kill commands on your flash drive. It does not install a special driver for USB drives. It is basically using the API of the operating system to write sector-wise information to a drive.

What distinguishes the Rufus-use from normal use of a USB flash drive is the amount of data written as a percentage of the whole drive. Such write behaviour will unmask errors much faster than just writing some little files on a flash drive. When writing images to USB flash drives you might particularly rewrite 50% and more of its content.

When in doubt you could use h2testw for Windows or F3 for linux to generate similar stress like Rufus for your USB flash drives and simultaneously verify if their labeled storage capacity is true.

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  • I am asking because I used the Windows To Go setting which seems to be very slow and I am not sure if Rufus can wear out a flash drive so fast when using that setting.
    – Magnus
    Mar 3, 2021 at 21:07
  • I am not aware of what that setting does unfortunately.
    – r2d3
    Mar 3, 2021 at 21:56

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