First post, by Rekrul
I have a Samsung brand, 256GB USB flash drive. It was working fine. Now however, I'm getting EXTREMELY slow read speeds from it. Like sometimes in the 150KB/s range. Some files will copy fast, but others take ages. Sometimes if I remove the drive and re-insert it, a file that was previously slow will suddenly be fast, but then others will be slow.
There also doesn't seem to be any pattern to which files will be slow, although, since larger files naturally take longer to copy, there's higher probability that they will slow down to a crawl before they finish copying.
I've tried it in every USB port on three different systems, and gotten the same results on all of them. I've run chkdsk, and the error checking from the properties/tools tab, and both say the drive is is fine. Obviously it's not.
I know this almost certainly means the drive is shot, and I've been copying everything off it, but it's slow going. I'm curious if this has happened to anyone else, or if anyone knows what would cause this.
I've been using that drive on a daily basis for a while now, but I was under the impression that when a flash drive fails, or hits the maximum number of writes, that you would have problems writing to it. I've never heard of a failing flash drive lowering the read speeds.
To be clear, as far as I can tell, all of the files still read OK, most of them just read VERY slowly.