I have a computer at home, that seems to be causing damage to USB memory sticks. I've had a couple of thumb drives wind up unreadable, and unrepairable after writing to them on this particular computer. I've also had a couple microSD cards give me trouble reading files after having been plugged in to this computer, and used it to look at the images stored on them, but without writing any files to them. Using the "scan and repair disk" routines on another computer seems to have fixed the microSD cards. Anybody ever hear of a computer's USB ports causing damage to solid-state memory media?
I've had a flash drive fail by the connector getting loose, but usually not electrically damaged that I know of. Only one really died that I recall out of a couple dozen I've used over the years.
Some got messed up in their logic by pulling them out without "ejecting" them or using the "Safely Remove" option on the taskbar. Those were either repairable or could be reformatted.
Well, there was the 1 Terabyte from a company I hadn't heard of that I picked up cheap at the secondhand store. It was super slow and gave corrupted files when read back.?ÿ I then looked up the item on Amazon and it had mostly terrible reviews with the same complaints I had.
Anybody ever hear of a computer's USB ports causing damage to solid-state memory media?
I've never known this to occur.?ÿ I'm sure you are correctly removing the USB drives, so my only suggestion would be check that all drivers are up to date.?ÿ If the USB ports and microSD reader are all bundled into one neat unit, you might also need to check that power is not being interrupted to that unit.
Most USB ports are only rated for X number of insertions/removals, and that X can be quite low, like say 1500. Might your port be physically damaged and in turn damaging the USB sticks?
It might be possible for a hardware failure to allow the port to go overvoltage and thus damage anything plugged in, but I've not heard of it happening in real life (much more likely for the port to just die)
