Sandisk UltraFit longevity?

[Fizzyade]

Hi,

 

I had a Sandisk UltraFit (64GB) die in September last year (after 6 months use), I had another one spare so replaced it with that, replaced the key and all was good.

 

Until last night, the replacement UltraFit died after 5 or so months.

 

I obviously can't replace the license as it's already been reassigned within 12 months, I've contacted support and in the mean time am running off a Trial Key on the new stick which is a Samsung USB drive.

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by Fizzyade

[testdasi]

Maybe I luck into it but my UltraFit has been all well for years across multiple iterations of my home server.

 

Do you use USB 3.0 port?

I only plug the stick in USB 2.0 ports. My hypothesis is that USB 3.0 higher speed generates too much heat for these micro sticks.

 

Mine is also the 16GB variety.

I think high density of data (particularly the partition tables) makes it easier to corrupt, especially under heat.

 

[itimpi]

USB 3 devices seem to be far more prone to failure than USB 2 ones. I suspect as  @testdasi mentioned because they tend to run hotter than USB  2 ones which is not good for a device plugged in 2x7.   For the same reason it can be  good idea to avoid the very small form factor drives .

 

Having said that I have used Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB drives with no longevity problems!

 

[Fizzyade]

What was weird is that the first thing I noticed is that the machine started thrashing the disks, when I logged into the GUI one of the drives had disconnected and the array was in a emulated state.

 

I rebooted the machine only to be met by the bios POST just displaying a static cursor.  Thinking it was a card failure, I unplugged all the cards but the machine still wouldn't boot.  Eventually I removed the USB stick and then bang it started the boot process.

 

Tried the stick on my Mac, but it was dead (well kind of, it had at least partly enumerated).  I then went to create a new USB stick, but I'm unable to create working sticks using the creator under Catalina, I've tried disabling SIP and tried both the GUI and the script but niether allow me to create a bootable USB.

 

Luckily I was able to nab my daughters laptop this morning (Windows) and created a stick and copied across my config from a backup, started up and it was back working with a trial key.  Limetech have thankfulyl sorted out my License issues as well really speedily!

 

Interesting about you guys running in USB 2 ports, I will try that, I have to stop the array to install the new key, so I'll use that opportunity to reboot and stick the drive in a USB2 slot.

 

Incidentally I actually do USB development myself and have a full USB2 hardware protocol analyzer here, so may see what the stick actually does on the bus when plugged in.

[nextgenpotato]

Mine also just died today after about 18 months (ultrafit 32G).  Completely gone and I don't have any recent backups.

It was hot when I pulled it out. I agree with the comments above, I think it's best to stick with USB 2.0 devices, I was using sandisk cruzer fit before and it worked fine for about 3 years and the stick still works ok.

 

So by the way, what do I do now? What did I lose exactly? If the parity is still intact I think I can recover without too much effort.

[itimpi]

4 hours ago, nextgenpotato said:

So by the way, what do I do now? What did I lose exactly? If the parity is still intact I think I can recover without too much effort.

You will not lose any data - just any settings you have customised from their defaults.   The Troubleshooting section of the online documentation accessible via the Manual link at the bottom of the UnRaid GUI has a procedure to follow if you are not sure of drive assignments.

[nextgenpotato]

@itimpi

Thanks!

 

I am now going through the USB recovery/switch process without "a recent backup".

Let me document the experience, it may be useful for others.

I did have a backup of the USB which was about a month old by the way, and it made some things much easier.

 

- Get new USB, setup unraid using the the unraid creator --> Easy

- Copy the license file to new usb and replace key --> Easy

- Add your drives back into right places in the array and start with valid parity checked. I have only 3 drives so it was easy for me to remember the config.

- Users were gone. I guess the file for user in the USB is "smbpasswd" copying this file to new USB may work.

But I just recreated users since I didn't have many and remembered the passwords --> Easy

- Shares were there but their settings were gone. I copied them from the USB backup under config/shares --> Easy if you have the backup, otherwise you'd need to redo all shares setting one-by-one could be time consuming

-VMs were all there with their settings intact. I didn't have to do anything there.

- Plugins were all gone, I reinstalled them --> Easy if you have a backup or if you remember what plugins you had

- Docker apps were there and running but unable to update, icons weren't there and Web UI option was gone.  The config for docker apps are under /config/plugins/dockerMan folder. Fortunately my backup contained my most important apps configuration.

It may have worked if I had uninstalled and reinstalled the applications.

 

That last step failed when I tried to update my docker apps and I started getting many errors around docker apps include "read-only file system"

I am not sure what exactly, but something went wrong with the image and it got corrupted.

It's best to delete the image and reinstall application from their templates.

With that I also switched from vdisk to folders under docker configuration. I had never seen this config before. Directory option must have been added with unraid 6.9 I guess.

 

Edited June 15, 2021 by nextgenpotato