How to Tell if a USB Drive has Failed?

Yesterday I had a USB drive that I made into a Chakra Live USB with LinuxLive. It worked fine. Today however I formatted it and went to put Linux Mint KDE 64-bit on it with YUMI. However, it was copying files over at under 1KB/sec!

I cancelled, formatted, and tried in a different USB port, with the same results. I also tried it with a new iso from a different mirror, in case the iso was damaged. Still the same results.

Is this incredibly slow copy speed evidence that the drive has failed? How do you tell if a flash drive has failed?

 

Try it in a different pc. No big deal anyways. You can get a 4GB USB drive for $5. A 16GB for $10.

 

I got a PNY 8 GB for $7.00 there cheap enough to buy a few of them.

 

I tried the Check Flash utility, and a pass found no problems. It's average write speed was between 2-4MB, which while slow compared to newer drives, is normal compared to the Bytes it was doing.

Maybe it is just having a problem with YUMI/Unetbootin?

 

Stop trying to diagnois it. Throw it out and get another one.

 

Corrupted files, 0 byte files are one of the couple things i've seen on dying USB's.

 

I actually replace my USB drives about every year. They get a lot of use. I have 2 16GB drives which contain everything I need for a house call.

 

I don't know a solution and maybe it is failing but I just thought I would mention that I have a similar problem sometimes. E.g. I have a 8gb Kingston USB and the other day I went to transfer a 300mb file and it went very slowly can't remember the exact speed but it took 12 mins when it usually takes about 30 sec. After i reformatted using Gparted it was back to normal. This issue appears so infrequently I haven't been able to track down the cause.

A couple of ideas/questions I thought up that I haven't been able to confirm are:
1) Does this happen after I've formatted the drive on Windows using NTFS?
2) Does this happen after I've created a live USB using Unetbootin/Universal USB installer?
3) Does this only happen on Linux? (I use Windows infrequently so I can't answer this)

It would help if you could answer any of these, thanks.