Technology

With everybody and their grandma shoving their cloud into your face, I’m happy there still are flash drives for sale.

I help out with a school activity for my kids and the organizer bought a bunch of 8 GB USB sticks off of Amazon for it, against my advice. We only needed a few hundred megs for the data, but some families had more than one kid in the group and needed 2x or 3x the data. 8 GB seemed to be the cheapest price point available in quantity at the time.

As we made the drives we found that some batches were always failing to copy properly. We then realized that it was always the batches with more data. After doing some forensic analysis, we determined that the entire batch of drives was only 512 MB of usable space, but still registered as 8 GB to the OS. Whenever the write went past that point, it corrupted files, but since the directory isn't stored in the same place, all the files would still show up in the directory list. It would only be when you opened the file that you would realize the data was gone.

I'm just glad I found it while we could still fix the problem by buying from a better source.

Capitalism and the race to the bottom, of course.

It’s probably a new plan to make USB sticks a subscription based system. You want access to your data? That’ll be 19.99 a month.

My school back in the day used to sell dirt cheap diskettes of such a bad quality you had to copy everything you had on there to your PC as soon as you got home because if you waited until morning the data would already be corrupted. Funny to see flash drives going the same way.

An interesting point not touched upon is that the types of people using USB sticks has changed. Because the use of technology filters down from tech savvy, to general population, to people late to the scene or can’t change.

We are in that last stage now. They are buying by price and so easier to take advantage of.

Data recovery firm CBL reports that memory chips in the most recent microSD cards and USB sticks are perhaps the most unreliable.

Homer: "the most unreliable so far"

I mean caveat emporium applies here and if you want cheap storage from Amazon sponsored cheap ass flash drive or when microcenter branded drivers by the checkout, those have always been the risks.

And honestly, as long as you understand that cheap shit is cheap components, I really don't have a problem with this since this saves these chips from being instant e-waste and puts it to use.

Still got a handful of these no-name microcenter SD and USB drives going strong along with those that have up the ghost.

Would Lemmings be so kind as to post their USB-A/C memory sticks of choice?

Right now I have a small collection of Kingston USB drives I bought a decade ago. Haven't had any issues with them yet, but I know they won't last forever. They're all named Reebok[storage capacity] (because sneaker-net).

So this is how I could buy a 2 TERAbyte usb thumb drive from Ali Express for a few bucks?

You're saying I should throw it away, right?

Because I would never be able to read the data that I thought was written to it?

You get what you measure holds true today as it always has.

I'm glad the article linked to this one:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/low-performance-external-m2-nvme-ssd-found-to-have-microsd-cards-inside

because that has been going on for at least 15 years (that I know of). When ebay was at it's peak it was impossible to buy a good USB stick there because it seemed you could only get 512 mb sticks disguised as 32 gb sticks with a price in between the two and coming directly from China.

The company says that in its business, it's finding more and more devices with cut-down memory chips with manufacturer names removed

Removing the identification from the top of ICs isn't that uncommon

Clearly discarded and unrecognizable microSD cards are also soldered onto a USB stick and managed with the external one on the USB stick board instead of the microSD's internal controller

This makes sense, the memory controller on uSD card doesn't normally do wear levelling and stuff that a larger flash drive does.

These chips are not completely broken, but CBL notes they come with reduced storage capacity, implying that reducing capacity was how they were salvaged.

Isn't disabling bad blocks of memory chips and selling them at the lower capacity pretty common?

Never cheap out on data storage unless you're okay losing what you store. Always get an independently well reviewed product from a known band

I need a USB stick about once every six months to update the map in my car and pretty much every time I need to buy a new one because even though the one I used the last time was stored in a drawer for six months, it doesn't work anymore when I need it a second time.