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...

[Phyzzi]

Over my many years of computer use, I have lost at least five "reliable" mechanical drives to catastrophic failure, and lost one high quality intel SSD to a major failure (in that case due to control failure and not memory failure). I have gotten cheap sd cards that didn't work in the first place recently, but otherwise have not had one, cheap or otherwise, fail (to my knowledge). I've also had several m.2 drives for several years now and never had one of those fail either. In the last several years, most of my issues have been with software or drivers, with reasonably stable hardware all around. However, I also generally make sure I have files backed up, usually on a computer or device, on an external drive, and online if they are important enough to warrant that, or just on a device and backed up through Steam or Google or Apple if it's, say, game save data and its loss would be annoying but not shattering. If I had data that was truly important beyond sentiment or short term work, it would be stored locally on a RAID with redundancy and on vetted cloud storage. Just due to the physics, that RAID storage would be semiconductor and not magnetic, because there's just no amount of improvement in mechanical magnetic storage that will make them better than high quality transistor storage, for data that is being stored and then only read.

That said, I wouldn't ever think of an sd or USB drive as secure long term storage unless it was from a higher quality line of a manufacturer with a good reputation and from a known source, so certainly not TeMu or AliExpress, or Ebay, and probably not Amazon these days either unless I have carefully checked the seller. Of course, just as with data, there are physical things where a catastrophic failure is just a mild annoyance. I will happily buy pajamas and fidget toys off TeMu, extra game controllers off eBay and sweatpants from sketchy sellers on Amazon, and I'll even grab a free swag USB drive from a promo table and use it to transfer sliced files to my 3d printer, but I can't imagine trusting them with actual important things like real data backups or photos that I don't have at least two other copies of.

 

[subspruce]

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.

you should budget for the data to be on:
- one device for the working copy
- a dedicated archive in another place miles away
- the cloud

 

[dakra]

Immediately after receipt of any new SSD, USB stick, or SD_of_any_kind card , I test the write rate, read rate, and capacity by running a script. It copies a 1GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) file to a directory with incremental names, such as 1GB001.BIN, 1GB002.BIN, etc. until the drive is full, then the same for 1MB (1,000,000 bytes) files, 1MB001.BIN, 1MB002.BIN, etc.

All that I bought have been slower than rated, but full capacity, though sometimes in decimal, such as 125,000,000,000 for 125 GB.

One microSD that was strange, I suspect, had two chips, a higher write speed for the first 64GB written and a lower speed for the remainder.
It was labeled as 512GB.

In reality, it had 536,870,912,000 Bytes, which is exactly 512,000 MibiBytes. No complaint.​

That capacity was raw, including MBR, Partition table, and file system.​

It claimed to be "Up to 60MB/s, UHS-I, A1, U1, Class10, V30,"

In reality, when connected via a card to USB-C adapter to a fast computer:​

Write speed for the first 64 1GB files: 40 to 41 MB/Sec.​

For files 65 .. 536, the write speed was 20 to 21 GB/sec.​

Read speed was 81 MB/Sec.​

At 2 of these for $35.99USD, I am not complaining.

As is not surprising, the ratings on Amazon for the product were 49% top, 41% bottom.
As is not surprising, the product, manufacturer, and retailer soon disappeared from Amazon.

 

[worstalentscout]

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

i only found out about fake SD cards last year...............i thought nobody will bother making fake ones since they don't cost that much !

 

[vliscony]

This was not surprising, I have experienced unusual failure rates with USB sticks, and I buy some well known brands, I had a series of unfortunate failures with Verbatim in particular.

 

[NeonHD]

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.

I know. It was my fault for not importing them onto my computer sooner.