I haven't gone through all 8 pages of this thread, but found it when I noticed my 2021 TM3 showing dashcam "unavailable" while driving. I've had the car for 9 months and ~8600 miles, still using the included Tesla USB drive. At first I figured it was just full (too new for wearout) and reformatted. Rebooted the car but it still showed "unavailable" at times.
To be at least a little objective and quantitative (albeit with a m0nsTroUs! sample size of 1) I pulled the drive and ran a
bad blocks diagnostic on it. That came back with
zero errors. It's worth noting that the controllers for these drives have error correction and wear-leveling built-in that's transparent to the host computer (in our case, the car's MCU). They silently bypass bad flash cells until they encounter uncorrectable errors.
I suspect for flash drive wear-out, the car wouldn't start showing "unavailable" or displaying errors until it starts seeing read/write/seek errors, or is just unable to mount the drive because the filesystem (FAT, which is
45 years old this year) is corrupt. That this is clearly not the case with my Tesla-branded USB drive, which suggests today's earlier post from
@rjpjnk covers the root cause for at least some of the "unavailable" indications we're seeing.
All that said, I'm still going to grab a Samsung Pro Endurance MicroSD card and MobileMate USB adapter, and use the Tesla-branded stick where I'll actually
see and enjoy it. It'll see much lighter duty shuttling screenshots between my oscilloscope and laptop.
-mtbkrdave
PS, had to make this after my previous 2019 TM3 chewed through its first USB stick...
What About Bob? never gets old.
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