Flash Drive (thumbdrive) failure on Steam CS2 Upgrade

[Thaziques Oliviér]

There was a big update released for CS2 yesterday. I started upgrade, download limit was 512KB. In several hours flash drive disappeared from OS. On replug now it shows it's raw. The flash drive is just 1 year in usage and has had no large amount of writes at all. I know they say software doesn't raise hardware failures. I came across similar topic of 5 y.o.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1629663905413194861/

The main idea is it's happened to me second time this year. Previous big CS2 update caused my HDD failure which is already dead confirmed and now its data are being restored for big money.

I wonder what the hell is going on there? It cannot be just coincidence

[Philco7a]

you run games from a USB thumbdrive?

[Thaziques Oliviér]

As you probably noticed I needed some drive to use after HDD failure.....

[Quint]

Your thumbdrive is most likely ♥♥♥♥♥♥. The reason being, you used it to run games. Thumbdrives are not very good things to run games as that requires lots of writes and reads. Which puts stress on the drive.

[Thaziques Oliviér]

So you suppose SSDrives are inappropriate for games?

[Quint]

Origineel geplaatst door Thaziques Oliviér:

So you suppose SSDrives are inappropriate for games?

SSDrive? What's that? An SSD that's connected via USB? If this js what it is then it's fine.

If it is a thumbdrive, no. You should not use thumbdrives to run games off of. It's too stressful for the drive to handle.

[Thaziques Oliviér]

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, and solid-state disk

Now you know...

[Thaziques Oliviér]

Everything set in flash drives. Or thumbdrives as you all are used to calling....
Now SSD is advanced accomplished version of thumbdrives roughly speaking. And both can be connected to PC through USB interface. Anyway both are based on flash memory. So in this context it doesn't make a difference, at least to the current topic

[Thaziques Oliviér]

You might be still interested. I have just broken a second thumbdrive in the same way, just unpacked. It sucks. This is most likely something local. I donno, maybe Antivirus. I have Avast installed. But I am unable to check it right now, I ran out of thumbdrives.... Other HDD is full and I don't dare to risk it. Just donno what to do