USB - Read Only

[Rick_]

After many problems booting from USB I have moved FreeNAS to SSD. Works much better.
Anyway, now the 30GB USB drive is rendered useless as it is read-only. I have tried many utilities such as DiskPart but none work to free the USB drive.

How can I recover this USB drive to be useful again???

Thanks

 

[Arwen]

Many USB drives are of poor quality. I now only buy USB flash drives from name brand companies, and from reputable sources.
Even then, I still test them after purchase with a tool that verifies size, (f3write & f3read, which is for *nixes). Some vendors still
sell fake flash that pretends it's larger than it really is. Works okay until it gets fullish... then disaster, lost data.

So the practical answer is, the thing is probably dead for good.

Part of the issue is that FreeNAS 9.3.x and later use a ZFS pool for the OS. Prior versions used a RAM disk image of UFS. ZFS boot
pools adds a bunch of features, like being able to roll back updates easily. Or media verification. But, it also is an easy way to find
low quality or out right fraudulant flash drives. ZFS will not tolerate bad blocks, as it won't pass corrupted data blocks to the OS.
While most other file systems don't even know it's bad, and may just randomly cause crashes without known cause. I prefer ZFS' way
of dealing with the bad block(s).