this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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602
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 (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

They’re doing that too. The real problem with these is that they misrepresent the storage size, and the firmware is set up to lie to your computer about the storage size. You can format it and it’ll seem normal. Maybe you buy one that claims to be a terabyte but only stores 100 gigs - you’ll see a terabyte in there. You copy 110 gigs or so over, you’ll see the files show up and it’ll tell you it successfully copied. No error messages, it'll just drop those last 10 gigs. There’s not really a way to notice without using a read/write program to fill every block.

It’s a shitty way to lose your data, and you might not notice until way later. Screws over the tech illiterate - probably no idea where their homework went. It would be much less harmful if they were just selling them as reject/lower capacity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I'm aware of those scams, but that isn't what the article talks about:

This report doesn't even touch on the plague of USB sticks that falsely claim to have several hundred gigabytes of capacity but only have perhaps as little as 16GB or even 8GB.