Data on USB drive missing after Power Failure? Is stick fried for good?

[chad]

A bit of advice for the future though: Always keep a backup of anything important on a flash drive. They're not reliable enough to keep the only copy of important files or documents. In fact, no computer media is. Even recordable CDs and DVDs can't be relied on 100%.

I hear ya. My wife gets tired of me telling her to make copies of her important stuff (she used to carry her international resume on a floppy! I would secretly back it up onto  the drive AND a CD and every time a floppy died (surprisingly regularly) I'd come to the rescue) I was the back-up geek at school and work, but with a few years of nothing bad happening, I got lazy, lazy, lazy. I must have thought about backing up that flash drive about ten times in the week before it fried...

I'm also the king of whipping the flash drive out of the port without safely switching it off... no more of that now, either!

Drive is dead, I've tried it on 3 different PC's, it's gone. Thanks all for the input. 

[Quantos]

I'd expect a surge to do this, but probably not a power outage.

Most power outages are followed by a 'spike' when the power comes back on.  To avoid this either buy really good surge protection for anything electronic, or run around and unplug everything before the power comes back on.

[BC_Programmer]

it was probably not a surge, or the sudden loss of power- but rather similar to what happens when you simply yank it out.

This is why I have write-caching disabled for all removable drives. I can just unplug them as long as I'm not using them.


I can't STAND removable drives & write-caching. "hey, let's leave the drive in a indeterminate state for a little while to gain a few ms performance at the expense of possibly losing everything".

Write caching was useful in the days of smartdrv (I still remember typing SMARTDRV /C before shutting down the PC) but now it is just another stick to trip over, that has questionable gains.

[Aegis]

This I did not know!  (On a long list of other things.   )

How do you disable this disk write caching?

There's that French word, again!   

[Quantos]

In My Computer just right click on the device and select Properties in the context menu.
Click the Hardware tab, select the device in question and hit Properties. 
Click the Policies tab, make your selection.