Reviving the Dead

My poor old Kingston Data Traveler 64GB was showing little signs of life. There was a faint pulse in the sense that my Windows laptop was showing that it had a size of about 4MB. My MacBook refused to recognise it at all. Reformatting in Windows had no effect on the 4MB upper limit.

It's been a while but I remembered that it was possible to perform a low level format on a USB drive. I searched about for a free utility program for this purpose and came across HDD Low Level Format Tool described as:

a freeware utility for low-level hard disk drive formatting. This small program will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify a SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disk drive.

One virus engine flagged it as malicious but all others gave the program a clean bill of health. It's a very small program (759KB) so that it downloads almost instantly. When installed and activated, there is a prompt advising that payment of $3 will speed up the program and entitle you to future updates. The last update was on 02/03/19. However, I proceeded with the free option and the formatting was painfully slow, taking well over an hour. 

However, the process was finally completed and I reformatted as exFat with a  resulting storage capacity of a little under 62GB. The disk now seems to be working well and is accessible from both Windows and OS X. One reviewer wrote the following about the software and it seems a fair appraisal:

The free version is capped at 50MB/s, personally I feel this is fast enough for personal use e.g. formatting the odd drive now and again which is exactly what it is for.

If I was using it commercially and formatting drive after drive, speed would probably be important to me and then certainly the paid "Uncapped" version is what I would go for.

Remember speed issues are very likely due to your hardware, or limitations in your chain from the software to your drive, remember it will only run and the speed of the slowest part of the chain. Also if you are using the free version and not hitting the 50MB/s cap there's no point buying the full version as you will not get a speed increase!

In attempting to copy 38GB from my MacBook to this newly formatted drive, the operation ground to a halt around the half-way mark. I tried a second time and again it failed. I think there is some inherent problem with this device and there are many reports on the Internet confirming this. Here is another site that is promoting a tool to fix the problems associated with the device. I've wasted enough time and I'm not going to bother anymore. My advice to anyone thinking of buying a Kingston Data Traveler is DON'T. In fact I'll be avoiding any Kingston products in the future if I possibly can.