Is it normal for flash drives to get hot

In most cases, it's nothing to worry about if a flash drive gets a little warm while you're using it. But what's going on inside when a USB flash drive heats up? And when should you actually be concerned about your USB flash drive overheating? Here's the lowdown on what could be happening when your USB flash drive overheats, and some tips on what to do if you're concerned. Today's solid-state USB flash drives generate a lot less heat during their operation than the old HDD external storage devices did.

But even solid-state drives do still generate heat , and computers also generate heat that they transfer to flash drives. Put these factors together and flash drives can get surprisingly hot during heavy use. A combination of the following helps determine which ones are the most prone to retaining heat:. These differences in heat generation are normal, and just because a flash drive generates a little more heat doesn't mean it's in any way unsafe to use.

However, if heat is a big concern for your flash drives, talk to us to learn how to help mitigate it. The internal components of flash drives are extremely reliable, but they're not foolproof and they do fail sometimes. A faulty component inside the USB flash drive could cause it to generate excess heat as it executes its functions.

Unfortunately, you may or may not be able to recover data from a flash drive that's gone bad, which is why it's so critically important to say it with us! However, I think it need to enable this feature on a flash drive manually. And the size of Ready Boost is determined by user. Add a comment. There are a few possibilities here.

Windows does indeed have more software that automatically scans, integrity checks, power manages, and generally uses USB memory sticks. This can cause the drive to get more activity in Windows than Linux, assuming default installations of each. The Linux drivers may be using the drive as a USB 2. This would increase usage speed and heat. Windows is assuming power is required over the USB port for a larger disk and is supplying more, even if unnecessary, through the port.

More precisely, the device requests more power from the port than is required. I've seen this happen with older motherboards and some off-brand USB devices. It can also happen if there is a USB extension or dongle involved and the cable is damaged internally, or on a direct connection, the interface board itself is having problems.

In theory, Windows 10 will catch this and notify of a power surge on the port, particularly if the cable is damaged, but it does not always successfully deactivate the port when it occurs. Windows Antivirus software may be doing scans of the drive when it isn't in use. CDove CDove 1, 4 4 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. It's also possible that the whole computer is actually getting hotter when running Windows, and the heat is being transfered to the USB drive.

Either through the metal or if the fan blows near it. If you have an external USB hub you could rule this out. Downvoteing for point 3.

This is not how electronics work. Think of it as a rope, the USB drive can pull up to 2A from the port, but the port can not push the rope into the stick. I don't think it warrants a downvote, but I agree with MattClark. Even if a port is USB-PD compliant, a thumbdrive isn't going to request higher voltages so the motherboard will default to 5V I'm pretty sure it's a HW implementation, so Windows doesn't even see this other than maybe a flag saying "this port has switched to USB-PD mode" or the like.

At 5V, even if the motherboard is capable of supplying ludicrous amounts of power say up to 20A even though that's not realistic , since the thumbdrive doesn't need that much power, you don't have 20A running through it. Modified answer still is physically impossible.

Given a 5V supply, the power drawn depends solely on the USB device. Show 12 more comments. Yes, this possibility is considerable.

However, If the Windows does not suspend the Pen drive. What component of pen drive is the source of heat? NAND, Controller or etc. However, U1 and U2 provide automatic power savings if properly enabled and meet specifications. If the link is active U0 , flash interface controller can consume 0. This make sense in some extent. However, there may be also other causes.

Thanks for this point. The easiest way to verify if the link goes in and out of U0 state is to use a device that shows the USB link status, like this one: amazon. I believe that the mechanism you mentioned. But a little doubt that 1 W power output will bring the temperature in such high level. It is physics issue now instead of technological one. Maybe for high performance pen drive, the power consumption of controller will be higher. I will collect further information in related area.

All in all, you point me a hopeful direction. Thanks sincerely. I partly agree with you. Windows will set all removable device as hot-plug. Maybe, different distro's situations are different. Tue Sep 11, pm Hi guys. I have 16gb usb flash drive connected to my pi as storage. However, it is getting hot even when idle. I would like to avoid that. Can I achieve this with hd-idle or something similar? I am not sure about it Thanks. Re: How to avoid usb flash drive getting hot when idle?

Wed Sep 12, am Have you actually measured "hot"? Your perception of hot is not useful information. USB memories typically run hot As most have plastic envelopes, much of the heat gets radiated by the metal connector body.