How to check the physical health of a USB stick in Linux?

There is no way to query a USB memory stick for SMART-like parameters; I'm not aware of any memory sticks that support doing so even via publicly-available proprietary software. The best you can do is to check that you can successfully read+write to the entire device using . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badblocks You want to specify one of the write tests, which will wipe all data on the stick; make a backup first. Find the device by looking at after plugging in the USB stick; you'll see a dev…