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.
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