News More and more USB sticks and microSD cards are being made with dubious components — data recovery firm uncovers no-name, low-quality NAND inside ma...

[Admin]

Data recovery company CBL warns that microSD and USB sticks are becoming less reliable as more are made with bad NAND flash.

More and more USB sticks and microSD cards are being made with dubious components — data recovery firm uncovers no-name, low-quality NAND inside ma... : Read more

 

[subspruce]

soon USB drives will be WORM storage

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

For sure, home long term storage should be mechanical drives.

At the bare minimum most if not all the data can be recovered if not encrypted.

Flash storage is pretty bad and speaks volumes from say ROM on old video game consoles that still work to this day.

 

[USAFRet]

For sure, home long term storage should be mechanical drives.

At the bare minimum most if not all the data can be recovered if not encrypted.

Flash storage is pretty bad and speaks volumes from say ROM on old video game consoles that still work to this day.

Mechanical drives made with counterfeit components would be just as bad.
Which is the problem here.

I'm quite sure someone could make and market a 3.5" drive, with castoff microSD cards inside, with the firmware modified to report whatever size and speed is desired.
And it would have exactly the same problems.

This not a case of solid state vs mechanical. This is a case of counterfeit components.

 

[Amdlova]

it's why I keep the old things with me... new ones it's kind of trash

 

[Sippincider]

Didn't see places mentioned, but am assuming these are being sold by pop-up vendors on the usual major sites where this kind of junk is found?

 

[Colif]

its all the fakes out there that are the cause. I don't expect brands like Samsung and Sandisk have this problem.

But when every online retailer is selling fake drives, what can you do? Well, you could check the makers website and see if the drive you are buying actually exists.

There doesn't seem to be any consumer protection. No one apart from Websites seems to be making this a big deal... oh, and Youtube channels

link below covers most of it:

Info - Buyer Beware - 16tb or larger External/Portable SSD/USB drives are fake

You currently cannot buy a real 16tb external SSD or any USB drives larger than 2tb, at all. They don't exist. But if you look on almost any retailer now they show you ssd that are labelled 16tb, 30tb or larger still. These are all fake. Same applies for any USB flash drive bigger than 2tb...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[vanadiel007]

"the two other drives shown had no names or labels"

And that says it all. Don't buy no name brands, and only buy from reputable sources. I never buy from third parties, resellers, scalpers or any of that if I purchase something on Newegg or Bestbuy.
And on Amazon I only buy what is sold by Amazon.

It is unfortunate Bestbuy, Newegg and Amazon are allowing anybody to setup shop and sell items without wanting to take responsibility for the pricing or quality of the goods sold.

 

[USAFRet]

And that says it all. Don't buy no name brands, and only buy from reputable sources.

Tell that to the people that buy from Temu, AliExpress, and Wish.
Many of whom hang around in here.

 

[NeonHD]

I guess that explains why my 256GB Netac microSD card only lasted for 1½ years before randomly dying on me. Lost my graduation photos among other things.

 

[USAFRet]

I guess that explains why my 256GB Netac microSD card only lasted for 1½ years before randomly dying on me. Lost my graduation photos among other things.

Your data should never exist on a single device.

Especially a flash drive.
Doubly especially on a microSD.
Triple that for a 3rd rate brand microSD.

 

[Colif]

the last 3 USB & only sdcard I own are from Samsung. They still work fine.
Not that I use them a lot.
2 x 32gb & 1 x 256gb USB.
The SD card is in an old phone... i assume it still works. I haven't used it in years now.

they not only location of anything on them. 256gb has a copy of all my music on it, but that exists elsewhere as well.

 

[MeeLee]

Believe it or not,but SanDisk used to have their key chain USB sticks with just a Micro SD card soldered on a PCB. Even the big brands do it.
Shame! Because reliability goes down, the device heats up too much, random read- writes go down etc...

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I bet the REAL problem is these off brand companies buying these chips are ignoring what the manufacturers say they can actually handle and instead are trying to run them as fast as possible which causes them to fail far sooner than they would normally.

But any drive can fail, even from reputable manufacturers and even first party banded . I've had USB drives from Lexar, Corsair, and Sandisk fail over the years out of the blue, it happens.

 

[Bulburt]

I have a few generic USB flash drives and SD cards kicking around, though i don't really use them for anything critical anymore, i used to use some of the SD cards for my camera, but a lot of them will throw up random errors out of the blue, and i even had one self-destruct in such a way that it cause any device that had it installed to act glitchy.

So yeah, after that, i've been phasing them out with name brand SD cards from brands like SanDisk, Samsung, and the like.

 

[cryoburner]

"the two other drives shown had no names or labels"

And that says it all. Don't buy no name brands, and only buy from reputable sources. I never buy from third parties, resellers, scalpers or any of that if I purchase something on Newegg or Bestbuy.
And on Amazon I only buy what is sold by Amazon.

It is unfortunate Bestbuy, Newegg and Amazon are allowing anybody to setup shop and sell items without wanting to take responsibility for the pricing or quality of the goods sold.

It was the actual flash chips inside the USB drives that had no markings on them and were unbranded, something you might not be able to tell just by looking at the product. The supposedly low-quality drives themselves were described as being mostly "promotional gifts," though some were described as being "branded products", though they didn't mention what those brands were. So it's possible that some of the drives might have have been from brands you would recognize.

 

[coromonadalix]

Even Amazon has crappy drives, they are sellers platform, dont take that for granted

bought some drives there, 1 month later it died .. rebranded with an XPG sticker on it ...

 

[worstalentscout]

what about microSD cards like the SanDisk Extreme that comes with lifetime warranty........if buying from an authorized dealer - it should be a good choice for a handphone ?

 

[USAFRet]

what about microSD cards like the SanDisk Extreme that comes with lifetime warranty........if buying from an authorized dealer - it should be a good choice for a handphone ?

Generally, yes.
Reputable brand from a reputable seller....you're almost certainly OK.

 

[JWNoctis]

For sure, home long term storage should be mechanical drives.

At the bare minimum most if not all the data can be recovered if not encrypted.

Flash storage is pretty bad and speaks volumes from say ROM on old video game consoles that still work to this day.

Anecdotal report: Files, some been there for at least the last 15 years, on my 20-year-old 128MB flash drive are still intact by the time I pulled them out couple years ago. Seems like they don't make them like they used to, even the not-fake ones. I wonder whether some of those no-name chips and microSD cards are actually salvaged. Some of those perfectly good SD cards in discarded phones must be going somewhere.

On the other hand, The ROM chips on old console carts will probably survive anything short of a nuclear EMP surge, being programmed quite physically by burning fuses on silicon or even dedicated lithography masks during manufacture. Newer carts with flash storage I'm less sure, though there are said to be some sort of refresh mechanism even though they cannot be rewritten as long as they are plugged in, for at least some of them - Wonder if we'd see reports of, say, Switch carts dying left and right in a decade's time, making them literal bitter pills to swallow.

I've been returning to physical copies for the most-irreplaceable and most-likely-to-remain-relevant data that fits the case, like family photos. Even a 2+1 backup setup has its limits, even on mechanical drives.

Still, putting any sole copy of anything you wish to keep on a flash drive is probably not a good idea at all.

 

[d0x360]

Some are promo drives salvaged and some are poor quality chips but they weren't sold they are usually stolen and then sold to small back room manufacturers (or people working in malls, I saw a guy in shenzen making them when nobody was at his stall) then those guys sell them on Amazon (or to someone who does or) wherever and they end up all over sold cheap and to generally unsuspecting people that use them once and toss them in a drawer or if they use it enough that it fails they don't understand why and buy more.

 

[h8GWBii]

Tell that to the people that buy from Temu, AliExpress, and Wish.
Many of whom hang around in here.

I buy TONS of crap from AliExpress and Temu.....but never storage, or anything that could be considered hi-tech. Just stuff that I need that's hard to screw up in manufacturing.

 

[Speeddymon]

I guess that explains why my 256GB Netac microSD card only lasted for 1½ years before randomly dying on me. Lost my graduation photos among other things.

They can be recovered. I had one from SanDisk die on me a few years ago. Found a company I like online that recovers SSD and mechanical disks, reached out to ask if they could do Micro SD and they do. PM me and I'll send you their info.

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

Promotional gifts, like the crappy usb on a keychain that's branded with the user group logo, like you get when you go to ASUG? They are unusable, just a means of publishing your logo on something.

 

[passivecool]

You get what you pay for. And kinda also what everyone else is willing to pay for.