How will a bad flash drive or external hard drive that’s plugged into a PC just lock up the entire system, or slow it down so much that it basically becomes unresponsive and needs rebooting?
In: Technology
That’s usually something caused by programs waiting on each other.
Program A needs something from the drive. The drive is broken, so it never replies. The program waits.
Program B needs something from program A. Program A is stuck waiting for the drive. Program B waits.
Program C for whatever reason also tries to access the drive. It also gets stuck.
etc.
Modern systems are full of all sorts of automatic functions like indexing documents and antivirus scanners. It’s easy for those to get snagged on a piece of bad hardware, and things can go downhill from there.
Another option is that the drive happens to be broken in some particular way that the operating system can’t deal with correctly, and so it just crashes entirely. Code that deals with disks and the data stored on them is deep in the core of the system, so if it fails, things tend to go wrong very fast.
There are two species of “bad flash drives”.
1) When a flash drive is plugged in, code on the drive is run as part of the operating system. Thsi code can literally do anything, install malware, encrypt your hard drive for ransom, anything.
2) When the flash drive is plugged in, it gets power from the computer, this is how you charge your phone via USB. If it puts that power into compact supercapacitors, it can charge them up in about 30 seconds. Then, using the data wires that run to your CPU, the capacitors can be discharged as a couple hundred hundred volts of spike current, literally electrocuting your CPU and rendering your hardware worthless.
If you have a modern computer, that shouldn’t happen. It’s probably because you have a low-spec computer, and all the stuff trying to see what’s on the drive all rush up to it, and since the USB is broken it doesn’t reply correctly, and everything is just waiting, not freeing up those necessary CPU cycles
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