Nevermind, I was running Parted Magic on a Virtual Machine. I burnt the iso on a Usb stick and booted my laptop to a true non-virtual Parted Magic session. My internal HDD was recognized and thus I could ATA secure erase my Sandisk Extreme.
Writing speeds went from 10 mb/s to 190. Could not be happier.
Again, thank you for the tips on bringing this flash drive back to life.
I’ve just bought a Sandisk Extreme 64 gb and wait for it… I’d like to format it to extFat, even before the first write/read. Reason: need/want larger files than just 4gb. So today I said to myself let’s a bit of reaseach and I was really afraid to find this thread and well here we are. I mainly bought this flash drive because its well promoted speed and don’t wanna lose this feature.
So for those who were able to recover original speeds (e.g with parted magic), have you guys formatted to fat32 or got the original speed with other formats?
I’m a huge fan of Western Digital and WAS a fan of SanDisk but after owning this stick it will be my last SanDisk purchase.
I work in I.T. and have formatted hundreds of drives. It’s a very common thing and i didn’t think twice about formatting this stick. The effort i’ve put in to get this back to a decent state is stupid, and it’s just not possible, the write speeds are less than that of a standard USB 2.0 stick. I’ve even tried aligning the partitions as previous posts have suggested but no dice.
For anyone who finds this thread in the future, make sure this is your last SanDisk purchase, they don’t deserve your money.
Or just make sure you don’t blindly format it cause that’s what you always do. New flash drive = new technology = new use proceedure. If you’ve been in IT for any period of time you should have seen other equipment and processes change, flash drives are no different.
" i didn’t think twice about formatting this stick"
If you want to make sure this is your last Sandisk drive you will have to think twice before buying another drive. Sure you’re up to it?
Sure, technology changes but there was no warning that came with the stick about formatting and worse than that SanDisk have zero tools to format or restore it to its former glory. Really the only way someone would learn not to format these sticks is by formatting them and then searching for a solution when it goes belly up. Otherwise there no way of knowing this specific issue (and it is an issue).
Like i said, i’ve got USB 2.0 sticks that now outperform the write speed on this stick, and this stick was not cheap. I’ve lost all trust for SanDisk now, as much as i like their products i cannot go back because of how terrible this has gone. I mean, where the hell is some formatting software from SanDisk? It doesn’t exist and I’m now moving on to better products, at least they will work as intended.
This is exactly what the issue is about. Formatting the factory filesystem has absolutely nothing to do with the slowing speeds and I don’t know why it’s being said that causes the problem. I’ve got 2 of these drives and one I formatted to NTFS and the other is still exFAT and both have slowed down in write and reads.
Using SecureErase in PartedMagic has restored it back to normal but surely the flash drive controller should be doing this automatically. I’ve already contacted the retailer I bought it from and requested to return them. You shouldn’t have to manually maintain the drive yourself to keep it working fast. It would have been a great USB drive if it weren’t for this issue.
>>Using SecureErase in PartedMagic has restored it back to normal
when you said “it is back to normal” by using SE/PM, I’d like to ask you 2 questions on top of this:
are you confirming the read/write speeds are back to the from factory speeds (up to 190 writting/up to 245 reading)?
if yes #1, what format have you choosen for to get them back (e.g. fat32, extfat, other)?
Thanks,
Hi zakear,
Yes, I used CrystalDiskMark to test read and write speeds on two different 64GB drives. One was formatted to NTFS and the other was left as exFAT like when it came from the factory. The speeds were roughly about 32-34 MB/s read and 12-15 MB/s write on the sequential parts of the benchmark. Both drives were performing similarly poor after having been used for a year and filled up many times.
After the SecureErase (I booted to linux and used hdparm instead of the gui tool as I couldn’t see my flash drive. See this page https://blog.oxplot.com/make-usb-flash-write-fast-again/ on what commands to use.) the drive no longer has a filesystem so I formatted it back to NTFS 4K cluster size using Windows 10.
I went and performed the CrystalDisk benchmark and speeds were back up to around 211 MB/s read and 139 MB/s write which seemed back to normal speeds.
I also tried copying a large file to the drive before and after secureerase in Windows 10 and before I was getting around 3-5MB/s write speeds, afterwards the drive was copying at around 95MB/s for about 10 mins (the time it took the transfer to complete) which seemed about right as I was copying from HDD -> Sandisk drive.
The drive was hot afterwards but back and performing normally. All these posts about ruining the factory partition/sector size is just rubbish. The drive uses SSD flash chips but I don’t think there is a controller embedded inside to automatically perform TRIM commands or do wear levelling, which is why the drive will slow down over time with use.
Maybe a majority of users who rarely use the drive to copy large files won’t see an issue, but if you use the drive too much it will slow down significantly.
After the SecureErase (I booted to linux and used hdparm instead of the gui tool as I couldn’t see my flash drive. See this page https://blog.oxplot.com/make-usb-flash-write-fast-again/ on what commands to use.) the drive no longer has a filesystem so I formatted it back to NTFS 4K cluster size using Windows 10.
Its abit overcomplicated, why u use linux commands when u already secure erased your drive with partedmagic?
I did a secure erase with parted magic like you too, after that i formated my stick with SDFormatter with these options.
Format Type: Quick
Format Size Adjustment: On
Thats it my speed went up again.
The good thing about SDFormatter is he sets the correct alignment automaticly, u can check that with AS SSD Benchmark tool (see screenshot) if there is ok you are good, if there is BAD you are i guess u know it
so i think the stick loses speed if there is a wrong alignment.
Just off the phone with Sandisk support. Their USB sticks and memory cards are ment to be formatted.
So, format them if you want for as much as you want. You won’t break it by doing so.
Just like SSDs, no way you can physically break your USB disk or have it’s performance degraded by formatting it (however obviously you will loose data on it). Well, not as long as you format it 24/7 for a couple of years (wear out memory chips by writing data more times than it’s been designed to handle; and those are pretty generous nowadays anyways).
So happy formatting, people!
If the drive performs slowly (or does not work at all) then you should contact the support.