Miss_Sissy

I recommend the ATP NANODURA 4GB, SLC-based, USB 2.0 industrial flash drive, an industrial drive with a rated endurance of 48TB/96TB (random and sequential write respectively) and 60,000 program/erase cycles. It has an MTBF in excess of five million hours at 25 degrees C and an operating temperature range 0f -40C to 85C. I paid $67 to DigiKey for mine, including taxes and shipping. Competing industrial SLC NAND flash drives from Delkin, SwissBit, Apacer and others are worth considering if you prefer a different brand (the prices are all very similar). All are sold through professional electronics distributors like DigiKey, Mouser, and Newark Electronics. If you prefer more general advice, look for SLC NAND flash drives. Avoid drives using MLC, TLC, and QLC NAND, as well as any drive where the NAND technology is not advertised. MLC, TLC, and QLC NAND each has only a fraction of the endurance of SLC NAND as illustrated in this chart from Kingston Technology: Note: While the ATP NANODURA is rated for "only" 60K P/E cycles, industrial electronic devices usually have specs that are much more conservative than the best-case sort of thing shown in that chart.

@FlamongOle: I've reinstalled it and it's working great! Thanks for the quick response at squashing these bugs.

Thank you. I plan to wait, but I worry about others experiencing the unexplained (to them) loss of their Unraid dashboard after an update/autoupdate or new install of the Disk Location plugin. It's easy for a troubleshooting session to turn ugly and time consuming if the person is perplexed as to the cause of the problem in a complex system. I don't want any of that to overshadow how grateful I am to FlamongOle for providing this valuable plugin. I look forward to this minor hiccup being resolved.

The only way that I know of is if you have a copy of the old .plg file. I do not have that. That is why I recommended that FlamongOle roll back the version in the Unraid repository.

I am also running Unraid 6.12.13 and my dashboard also went blank after installing the latest update to Disk Location plugin. Safari and Chrome both showed a blank dashboard. I tried rebooting my Unraid NAS, but that had no effect on the blank dashboard issue. As soon as I uninstalled the Disk Location plugin, the dashboard returned to normal (minus the disk location graphic, of course). Reinstalling the Disk Location plugin resulted in the same issue -- a blank dashboard. FlamongOle, I recommend that you remove this latest version and restore the prior one in Unraid's repository until the root cause of this issue is discovered and resolved. Lacking any on-screen clues as to the cause of the blank dashboard, there's too much chance of someone wasting a lot of time with memory testing, flash drive rewriting/replacement, array parity checks, etc.

I think that's a solid choice. I have nothing against mass-market flash drives; I have a small tackle box filled with them (currently 19 drives in it, but some scattered about the house). They are fine for transitory, non-critical applications such as installing the Linux-du-jour or moving data to air-gapped systems. I agree, and I try to live by the rule "if you don't criticize my choices, I won't criticize yours."

That's like you telling a professional photographer "I have a lot more faith in Kodak that some unknown company named 'Leica' selling a magic-bean camera." ATP has been around since 1991, focusing on the industrial marketplace since 2011. They are sold by Mouser, DigiKey, and Avnet, all of which cater to professional electrical engineers. There's nothing "snake-oil" about ATP's industrial drives, as any competent EE could tell you. Their SLC NAND, SSD-style controllers, performance, endurance, MTBF, extended temperature range, etc. are all in line with competing drives from Swissbit, Delkin Devices, and Amtron (let me guess -- you also think that those are 'unknown companies' selling "snake-oil USB keys"). I can't argue with such rigorous stastical analysis carried out on such a large sample set. Having more NASs doesn't increase uptime. It decreases it. You might take out fewer services down when one NAS fails, but more boxes doesn't lead to less downtime. If the NAS supporting your security cameras fails while you are on travel, it will be of little comfort to know that your Plex media server is still up and running. Having spare USB flash drives at home does no good if you are not at home to flash and install them. Don't you ever travel? Can't you imagine being out of town for business, a vacation, a wedding, or a funeral? Some people would rather have a toolbox drawer full of $.88 Chinese screwdrivers than one set of Snap On screwdrivers. To each his/her own.

So the inconvenience and frustration of your NAS going down in an unscheduled manner, not to mention your actual labor, is worth less than $60 to you? I'd happily pay an extra couple of hundred dollars to avoid that situation, partly because the failure could happen while I was out of town for business, a wedding or a funeral, or on vacation. I cringe at the thought of writing something like this: "It sounds like the NAS thumb drive is corrupt. I can fix it when I return home next Wednesday. Until then, all backups to the NAS will fail. Bitwarden password additions and changes won't sync between devices. You won't be able to access any of the home security cameras because they rely on Shinobi Pro which runs on the Unraid NAS. All of our movies and TV shows on the Plex server will inaccessible. Our shared music library will also be inaccessible. You won't have access to any of your files, or our shared files, that are only on the NAS and you won't be able to write new ones to it. I'm sure that there are other things out of commission that I have not thought of. But I saved $60 on our $1,600 NAS! Aren't you proud of me?" Yeah, that would go over like a lead balloon. That's what I call "faith-based engineering." I don't do that. If I didn't care about reliability and maximizing up-time, I would not have five 18TB enterprise class drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration. Any two of those drives can fail without the NAS going down, but the boot flash drive is a single point of failure, so I'm sure not going to cheap out on that device.

What is your time worth?

I am not up for a game of 'here's my anecdote -- where is your data?' This has dragged on too long already, likely to the annoyance of others. Let's drop it before the moderators ask us to. In closing, buy whatever flash drive you want. For me, the best choice was the 4GB ATP NANODURA SLC industrial drive. For you, it might be something else.

Yes, I bought the 4GB B800Pi model ATP NANODURA drive. Unraid's flashing utility recognized it by brand and model and wrote to it without any issues.

That's probably because people normally use flash drives for as sneaker-net-style media rather than archival storage. That said, the Unraid forums are filled with messages about data corruption on flash drives. It's an improvement over a write-once strategy, even though it does nothing to address wear levelling. But you can't start with a $7 thumb drive and then format and rewrite your way to SLC industrial drive levels of endurance, data retention, and lifespan. For me, paying $67 for the ATP NANODURA industrial drive and then formatting and writing it just one time made the most sense. Both my peace of mind and my time have value. Also, I'd feel pretty stupid if a failed $7 consumer thumb drive took down a $1600+ Unraid NAS that I built to survive two simultaneous hard drive failures.

But the difference is that SSDs employ sophisticated controllers with functions like "patrol read" to refresh data cells before they become unreadable: The above quote from this article: https://www.ssstc.com/knowledge-detail/patrol-read-ssd-integrity/ Obviously that won't work on an SSD that's sitting unpowered in a drawer for a decade, but if you power it on, even if just occasionally, it can perform that sort of self-repair.

That’s up to 10 years, whether powered or unpowered. As you no doubt know, being powered doesn’t slow the charge leakage within the NAND cells. Nor does reading the data. You really need to rewrite the data in order to refresh it.

Conventional flash drives (AKA thumb drives), including geniuine SanDisk, are not designed for long-term data storage. As Integral Memory's website says: Note the highlighting, which is mine. While 10 years sounds like long time, "up to 10 years" could be far less. I'm risk-averse when it comes to NAS reliability, so I went with the ATP NANODURA, which I mentioned in a post above.