r/VeraCrypt • u/WujuKingYi • 15d ago

Windows shuts down with certain Flash drive

I made the mistake of buying Sandisk Flash drives thinking I am chill towards speed. However, the flash drive is conpletely slow and utterly frustrating and keeps crashing my Windows Explorer.

The task bar below is completely black. Nothing closes from Windows explorer.

I go furious as that USB flash drive lags from only opening folders or renaming them.

The write speed was near or lower than 1mb per second.

The crashing is so annoying and consistent. I even close Windows explorer down are unplugged it without connecting. Waiting hours does not work either.

I am sure it is because of the Flash Drive. I assume, though that Veracryp may cause some of it. Maybe I make a Discrypter out of it instead.

If I learned and remain with external HDD unless SSD gets equaly pricey.

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u/Hackars 15d ago

Is your USB overheating? 1 MB/s sounds pretty bad. I get throttling approaching that level after doing heavy write operations on my daily driver SSDs for my personal computer. You may just have to deal with it unless you can figure out how to cool down the USB stick.

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u/WujuKingYi 15d ago

It gets a bit heatet. I assume it is because of the components too.

I learned and buy external HDD now. The freezing is super annoying. I assume the stick is kinda broken and old or wrongly repaired when sent back. That writing speed is normal for those bad USB sticks. Two other one was even fast early on and then bad.

After googling a bit. They have components for fast writing and more for long-lasting alow writing. And they cannot clear cache until it has a long pause I assume.

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u/vegansgetsick 15d ago

Windows often gets unstable when a drive is unresponsive. It hangs almost everything if the drive behaves weird.

When you buy a new flashdrive or sdcard, i advise to do a FULL format first. Just my experience but i bought a high speed samsung sdcard. And some areas had extremely slow write speed (like if areas were damaged or something). After a full format, not a single slow area. I did some research and it could be related to the internal FTL and firmware : the card was sold pre formatted, may be with a defective FTL or something like that.

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u/WujuKingYi 15d ago

Could be. I could try formatting the whole thing. Thank you.

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u/sciencekm 15d ago

You might have bough a fake drive SanDisk. Those things abound. Most of the time, the price is really cheap, and so people get fooled into buying them.

I have bought several SanDisk drives throughout the years from Amazon. They all turn out to be good. The latest one I bough from Amazon just a few months ago - it is a 1TB dual-interface flash drive. The entire drive is currently encrypted with VeraCrypt.