Comment on More and more USB sticks and microSD cards are being made with dubious components — data recovery firm uncovers no-name, low-quality NAND inside many devices

dhork@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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 an one kid in the group and needed 2x or 3x the data.

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.

I’m just glad I found it while we could still fix the problem.

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