Report Reveals Decline In Quality of USB Sticks, MicroSD Cards (techspot.com) 71
A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of.
Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."
The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.
Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."
The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.
This has always been the case. (Score:2, Insightful)
You should always test it immediately after getting it. If it doesn't meet what you expect, return it. I'm pretty sure this is nothing new.
Buy from reputable sellers, test the cards, and don't rely on them for backups until you've tested the FULL CAPACITY. Also, if it's too good to be true, it definitely is. NAND chips are a commodity, and if someone is claiming to sell a 1 TB drive for less than everyone else it's definitely fake. Brand means nothing unless you can verify the authenticity of the device. I'
Re: This has always been the case. (Score:2)
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Outside of really high end server grade stuff, everyone uses multi-level NAND now. Some have a TLC cache area for performance, but QLC isn't really bad per se.
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Yeah TLC isn't bad per se, but even brand names will gladly sell you something that barely works. I have a Crucial BX500, though it was a great deal, but I didn't do my research and turns out it's DRAMless TLC ("3D" flash). It performs worse than a traditional hard drive for sustained writes. It's actually complete garbage. The fact that they even sell this trash is disturbing, and QLC is even worse. It really is buyer beware at this point.
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It's not disturbing, it's fantastic. I have upgrade a few machines for friends with those cheap DRAM-less SSDs. They don't do a lot of writing to the drive, but their systems are overall much, much faster than when they had mechanical drives. Things that used to take 30 seconds to open now load up in two or three.
If you want performance, you can pay for it. Not everyone needs to do though.
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Yeah TLC isn't bad per se, but even brand names will gladly sell you something that barely works. I have a Crucial BX500, though it was a great deal, but I didn't do my research and turns out it's DRAMless TLC ("3D" flash). It performs worse than a traditional hard drive for sustained writes. It's actually complete garbage. The fact that they even sell this trash is disturbing, and QLC is even worse. It really is buyer beware at this point.
I started with the BX500 series and made the same observation about sustained writes, however the MX500 series which does include DRAM is also slower than hard drives with sustained writes. There might be an advantage with write amplification.
Re: This has always been the case. (Score:2)
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You should always test it immediately after getting it. If it doesn't meet what you expect, return it. I'm pretty sure this is nothing new.
Who is supposed to test and who is supposed to return them? Companies who give them away as promotional gifts of people who receive them as promotional gift?
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No?
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> You should always test it immediately after getting it.
What? Are you serious?
Will you also test your CPU*, PSU? stress test everything? Crash test your car?
When you buy a box of fuses, do you test them that they actually blow when they're supposed to? (hint: they sometimes don't https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] )
We need to be able to trust that what we buy actually works as intended.
*How many of us would test so far to find the AMD STAMP issue? https://www.anandtech.com/show... [anandtech.com]
"... promotional gifts ..." (Score:2)
Like those AOL floppy disks! Perfect for repurposing as backup storage.
Or not.
Re:"... promotional gifts ..." (Score:5, Informative)
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We had no option but to use tape to write-protect on our 128Kbyte hard-sectored 8-inch floppy drives. Oh, we're not going that far back? :-)
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Isn't the 8-inch floppy write-protect system the opposite of 5 1/4" - you take the tape *off* to write protect them, right?
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Here we go again (Score:2, Interesting)
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This test was biased by focusing on "promotional gifts." These products are always cheap. If you get a promotional backpack, or jacket, or whatever, it's all about the logo, not about quality.
Re:Here we go again (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought my first USB thumb drive (a 1Gb drive) around 20 years ago, and it still works fine. I've received numerous promotional USB thumb drives over the years from employers and trade shows. A few of those still work. I found that any thumb drive fails in the USB plug in a TV tuner after about a week of recording shows.
7 years ago I traveled to start a job and brought some USB drives with me. I needed to install Linux on my new work laptop. I used what appeared to be a nice promotional drive. I put the install ISO on the drive. It failed on the install every time. I switched to a purchased Toshiba USB thumb drive. It worked fine. I was convinced that when the memory is manufactured the manufacturer takes the memory that is sub-standard, failing tests and sells them for promotional drives. For most uses of promotional drives the bad sectors are marked and are thus skipped and the rest of the drive works fine. Use as a boot/install device it cannot have bad sectors and fails.
BTW, I had several purchased name-brand USB thumb drives fail in the last 5 years. Maybe the quality is going down. However, speed going down. I don't know. That's never been an issue for me.
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I was convinced that when the memory is manufactured the manufacturer takes the memory that is sub-standard, failing tests and sells them for promotional drives.
I'd suggest that it's more intentional than that. The companies that make promotional gifts, specifically order the cheapest devices they can find, even though this means the quality will be poor, because they don't care about quality at all. If a manufacturer doesn't make something cheap enough, some of these vendors are big enough to demand even further reductions in quality to meet their price point.
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i really doubt the people ordering promo usb drives are negotiating "even further reductions in quality"... there's always someone (usually many someones) leading the race-to-the-bottom and ready to accommodate our ever-growing demand for dogshit trinkets.
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I bought my first USB thumb drive (a 1Gb drive) around 20 years ago,
Must have been a magical 1 GB drive from the future
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I bought my first USB thumb drive (a 1Gb drive) around 20 years ago,
Must have been a magical 1 GB drive from the future
1GB thumb drives were indeed first available around 20 years ago. [britannica.com]
You might be thinking of 1TB drives, which were available about a decade later.
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I gave up on USB drives years ago, and replaced them with SSDs mounted in USB enclosures.
Industrial MicroSD cards seem to work well enough so far. I am not sure anybody makes full size SD cards which are any different than MicroSD cards at this point.
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It seems like the last stage of any useful technology is enshitification.
No it just seems like we are incapable of applying any critical thinking to any story. The story here is that the cheapest nastiest products that are literally given away to others are made of the cheapest nastiest components, and always looking for a lower bar to set. Nothing more, nothing less.
Your typical good quality USB sticks are just fine. It is also well known that the SLC vs QLC debate is also completely and utterly pointless with QLC storage being more than adequately reliable for virtually all lo
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It seems like the last stage of any useful technology is enshitification. 1) New promising tech comes along and generates buzz, 2) early adopters start using it, 3) it becomes mainstream and people become accustomed/dependent on it, 4) "cost reduction" kicks in and the enshitification begins...
Whilst your description of how Enshitification occurs (platform decay, if you're that much of a prude) it's not the case here.
I clicked on the article so you don't have to (it's Techspot, so I took the bullet) and the report (which is in German) says that it's NAND chips that fail QC that are being resold with the manufacturers brand removed.
They're knowingly and deliberately selling substandard parts, sadly this kind of thing is commonplace and frankly, ancient. CFM (jet engine manufacturer) had a hu
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That's because the low end drops out. In the race to the bottom, it's what you expect.
But at least with memory devices, you can still pay to get good quality stuff. The reports are talking about the promotional stuff right now, which is stuff that's designed to be cheap. After all swag costs money and if you want to give something useful it's got to be made to the bottom dollar. In this case using cut-rate materials that didn't quite pass QA testing.
But you can also get good quality USB sticks - it's why th
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Can we just have one god damned day where we don't use the word "enshitification" to signify degradation? I proposed a while back, in order to stop enshitifying the web with the word enshitification we refer to it as it actually is. Investorfication. Investors want costs reduced, profits increased. Investorfication is the result. Lowered quality, increased profits briefly, then fading away as people grow sick of the rot.
They noticed that now? (Score:3)
I have some about 10 year old 2GB USB2 sticks that are much faster than new "fast" ones on writes and that were not expensive back when. Especially write performance has really gone to shit. Well, the same is true for utterly crappy SMR 2.5" USB drives, of which I had to physically destroy 4 now because I do not have the time to wait for 40 days for one complete overwrite. Crap Toshiba and a bit better, but still crap WDs. All not secure erase capable. Well, the WDs were, but bricked themselves when using it.
I am now back to putting 3.5" CMR drives in external enclosures and for USB sticks I use both older, better ones and some external SSDs. What a sad state of affairs. Enshittification at work.
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> because I do not have the time to wait for 40 days for one complete overwrite
Issue the ATA Secure Erase command. Not only should the drive wipe itself but it will restore performance to a factory state.
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Whoops,
I missed you stating they were not SE capable.
They must really be shit then!
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Indeed, they are total crap. And they were not cheap. The Toshibas even tricked me with the first overwrite only taking something liker 6 hours (at 5TB), which is acceptable. But then I put customer data on them and had to erase them afterwards and ended up at an estimated 40 days for that. Completely broken by design trash.
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Especially write performance has really gone to shit.
Well yeah if you buy cheap shit ones you should expect what you get. On the other hand I don't have a single USB-C memory stick that has a slower transfer performance than the USB 2.0 bus to say nothing of filesystem overhead or the speed of the device of the day.
If you can't push more than 50MB/s to your USB stick, you are the problem. Stop buying the cheapest stick you can find on Amazon.
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You have no clue what I am buying. That I now go to SSDs as replacement should have told you which price-range I am buying in, but you are too thick to pick up on something like that.
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I am doing that as well. Added benefit is that the ones I use have a write-protect switch.
It is just a pretty sad testimony to human greed and incompetence that sticks have gotten significantly worse. What I miss is sort-of an "industrial" offer, with long endurance, reasonable speed, long data-retention and physical switch for write-protect and coming with a data-sheet that is honest and tells you what you get. What really annoys me most is the constant lying about product characteristics we get in the con
Re:What a bogus story! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which brands and models are good these days? (Score:2)
USB sticks are slow even at USB3 and USB-C speeds like from SanDisk brand. Too bad they don't have tiny SSDs with USB3 connections.
Re:Which brands and models are good these days? (Score:4, Interesting)
SSD's are still slow too.
It's actually not the device that is slow, but the filesystem used and the *overhead* in creating files.
Right now I'm copying 133,000 files from a flash drive onto my PC's SSD. What speed? Well I sometimes gets to about 500KB/s but usually stays 100KB/s.
In total the data is only 3GiB but will take an estimated 35mins to copy!
The issue is that these files are tiny. It took 2 whole hours to write them to the flash drive in the first place, over a USB 1 port mind. The write and read speed of flash, and hdd's even, greatly imporve with larger transfers. There is a heavy cost associated with opening and closing each file so a few large files transfer at "FULL SPEEEEED!" but small files bump along at speeds that make you cry.
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It's a shame that dd isnt inluded in windows!
Besides, I wouldnt bother doing that. The solution always was to archive the files with a destination path on the usb drive. You dont even need to compress the archive, just tar or zip them to a file on the flash drive.
Unfortunatley in my example I didnt do that as I was using a windows XP machine to copy the files off from (I had used to to recover a backup exec tape) and had way to many other things on my plate before I realised that I should have zipped them
Defective produce being resold on the gray market (Score:2)
SSD drives (Score:2)
Re: SSD drives (Score:3)
So writing 100 GB or even 400 GB is fast. The drive writes into cells treating them as one-bit cells. If you then stop writing, the drive copies the data into 4-bit cells. For 400 GB that
SLC intake buffer, good enough for swap? (Score:2)
So writing 100 GB or even 400 GB is fast. The drive writes into cells treating them as one-bit cells. If you then stop writing, the drive copies the data into 4-bit cells. For 400 GB that takes over an hour. After that hour, writing is fast again.
I've seen Slashdot user guruevi refer to this SLC area as an "intake buffer" [slashdot.org]. It's like the conventional (CMR) intake buffer on a shingled (SMR) HDD. And according to guruevi, Apple's m.o. of having 8 GiB of RAM on the CPU package and a swap file in an SSD's SLC intake buffer ought to be enough for anyone.
Imagine you had a car that can drive 200 miles a day very fast and then slows down to 5mph. Many people would never even notice. For others that would be a fatal flaw.
Sounds like a battery electric vehicle with a range-extending solar roof.
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Most QLC drives have an SLC cache on them for writing. Depending on the drive this is a very big cache as well. E.g. My 2TB Samsung 870 QLC drive is blazingly fast for the first 78GB of continuous writing. SEVENTY EIGHT GIGABYTES. Any judgement made about write speed less than 78GB has nothing to do with QLC.
It is worth understanding how your drive works and is configured, rather than just blindly looking at size vs cell type.
If I could find a new SLC drive I'd buy it... (Score:2)
I don't think anyone manufactures SLC chips anymore, they're not easy to find since it appears that the market has well and truly moved on, however, I wonder if it is possible to implement QLC flash with appropriate controllers or firmware to effectively turn one into SLC? It would mean reducing the capacity, I guess by 16 times, if a QLC chip, but considering the sizes available today, I think to have a durable and reliable drive, that's no large loss.
At least in my situation, 32gb is plenty to back up "im
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You market it as having multi-PB write endurance. Imagine spreading the wear-leveling for 32GB over a 512GB drive.
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I think for the nerds, this may matter, but otherwise, it'll be a tough sell as the write endurance tends to be kind of meaningless, whether the manufacturer chooses to specify it. Point is, the size and price are probably the two most important factors, as even something like speed is usually a lie.
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The reliability differences between an SLC and QLC drive are actually irrelevant. You're not using your USB stick as a database server.
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I don't think anyone manufactures SLC chips anymore, they're not easy to find since it appears that the market has well and truly moved on,
Swissbit sells SLC Flash in various forms but wow, it sure comes at a premium price.
So the quality really hasn't declined (Score:2)
Back in my day... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to sell these things as an "Equipment Specialist" in Office World (before Staples took them over). This was my part time job for 6/7 years and funded me as I was going through Uni doing a degree in IT. Back then these drives were 32/64/128MB that sort of size and they dropped like flies if you happened to look at them incorrectly.
They were crap. Hyper expensive and were always being returned by customers having died. I used to carry a few over the years with useful tools and software on it in my pocket but they too would just die. They eventually seemed to get better.
During that time I needed to be able to transfer approx 256MB frequently from Uni PC's. I went for a USB Zip 250 drive. It was about twice the cost of a 256MB USB flash drive (£80ish) but had the amazing ability of using removable media; Zip discs, access to which was cheap as chips (Office World sold them and they would bin a whole pack if a customer returned them so I had plenty!). Anyway the drive still works fine to this day.
Flash media (more accuratly "flash devices" as they are not removable media) have gotten better in reliability terms, and I'm quite a fan of the SD Card (full size) form factor, but they still have the annoying modes of death where they go read only, if you are lucky, or totally reset their internal state and wipe themselves clean if you are not.
I use them but consider them as reliable as an old HDD salvage from a laptop used by a salesperson (guess what I am using at home), they are great for transport and temporary storage. Even decent DSLR's can write to two cards at once to mitigate the chance of card failue.
One thing that really annoys me however is how they maintain their high cost. Surely by now I should be able to get 2GB or 1GB cards for pennies?? No, as the cost is not on the capacity but on the manufacturing process thus the cheap stuff is the biggest stuff and the slall stuff is marginally cheaper.
Thats why I still burn DVD-R and bd-r when being frugal as they are so much cheaper, and actually being removable media they are totally independant of the R/W electronics. I mean a 4GB DVD+R costs me all of £0.33 but a 4GB flash drive is £8 for a no name 3 pack on Amazon so about £2.60 for each. So if I had to send 50 of them with data on them to the same destination frequently it would cost £130, but if I were to send 50 DVD+R's AND a USB DVD drive (only need to send that once) it would cost me £36.99 total. Then £16.99 thereafter for each 50x DVD's I post (excluding postage fees but they are the same for the flash drive anyway).
I'm just amazed that I keep getting told that flash and usb flash are the best and optical media is somehow dead and unusable, well the numbers speak for themselves. It's all still avaliable easily and dirt cheap.
So why do we have fake low quality flash media?
It's the numbers again, there is loads-a-money in it. Can we fix it? To do that we would need a way to interrogate the flash device to determine if it is real or not and right now thats next to impossible. Even the media ID on an optical disc can be fake...
I remember a story I bumped into from a guy working in Tiwan with SD cards. He was contacting Sandisk regarding fake cards, that actually came FROM THEM and had somehow entered their stock! So yeah, even official manufacturers will sell you what even they think belongs to them yet doesnt.
He found the best way to avoid it, to reduce the chances, is to buy official cards etc physically off the shelf in a store, the end of a chain which he says is unlikley to get fake stuff from Sandisk unwittingly. But as he was doing, bulk purchaces etc, well even from Sandisk own warehouses, the fake chips wriggle into the stock flow, sometimes with the correct Sandisk markings too!
Don't buy junk! (Score:2)
I am shocked that the quality of junk products is actually going down! SHOCKED!
Sure, brand name doesn't mean what it used to but generally unless it is a knock-off (another problem) then you are doing the best you can with the current 'global market economy' situation.