I use USB stick/thumb drives in STBs/PVRs and no doubt they take a thrashing when repeatedly recording TV programs. Like most of us, I've many of them and whilst I try to keep the TV ones separate from those I use on my computers they often get mixed when I need one for my PC in a hurry.
What I want to know is there any general purpose utility that is capable of testing a variety of brands of these devices and doing a decent assessment of their state/reliability?
It seems that drive manufacturers don't provide much help here as I've not seen any such utilites for them. I raised this matter with a SanDisk rep at a trade show several years back and he said he didn't know of any.
Same problem applies to SD cards (SDHC, SDXC, etc.), so any info on them would also be useful.
What I want to know is there any general purpose utility that is capable of testing a variety of brands of these devices and doing a decent assessment of their state/reliability?
It seems that drive manufacturers don't provide much help here as I've not seen any such utilites for them. I raised this matter with a SanDisk rep at a trade show several years back and he said he didn't know of any.
Same problem applies to SD cards (SDHC, SDXC, etc.), so any info on them would also be useful.