USB flash drive not showing up

[mac_in_tosh]

Yesterday I took home an encrypted USB flash drive that had been sitting in our bank vault box for about five months. When I tried to mount it the little light on the drive turned on but nothing showed up. This can happen occasionally with these things and what I have done in the past was start up Disk Utility and manually mount a drive, only this time it didn't even show up there. Other drives worked in the same USB slot, this drive wouldn't work in any other slot and a reboot didn't help so I'm pretty sure it was the drive itself.

I'm not looking for help retrieving data from the drive, which I've already destroyed. I'm just wondering what could have happened to the drive by just sitting unused. Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

Sometimes USB flash drives just "go dark" on you.
A lot of them don't seem to be all that "robust" in construction or design.

Just a thought, but if you're going to store data in a bank vault, I'd do so on either a platter-based hard drive or an SSD, and leave it "in the clear" (NO encryption). It's in a BANK VAULT, after all.

 

[mac_in_tosh]

Thanks for the information. As far as leaving it unencrypted, I'm too paranoid to do that as banks can get robbed, there could be employee theft, etc. Is there a technical reason why encryption would increase the chances of the drive failing?