Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought
Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought
arstechnica.com
Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought
44 comments
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Just happened to me the other day at THE worst possible moment. I bought a new mainboard which needed a BIOS update to work with my new CPU.
Me of course being a cheapskate I bought the cheapest one with no Bios flashback. So I put the files on a cheap USB, start the upate and compleatly bricked the mainboard.
After that I plugged the USB back into my PC and the fking USB corrupted the files.
Luckily I managed to save the BIOS but absolutley lost it in that moment.
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Value your time and sanity over pure monetary value. It seems like something Lemmy users seem to do the complete opposite of at all times.
Saving $1 on a flash drive could have cost $100 on a motherboard. Saving $20 could have cost you $100 buying another one.
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Learned this lesson the hard way, once bought a cheap replacement laptop charger for one that had broken.
It didn't work and instead borked the backlight of my screen. I then discovered that on this model, the backlight couldn't be separately replaced, had to buy and fit a whole new screen and then also buy another replacement charger.
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The flashdrive in case was a random merchandise gift thing. It worked previously and was just the first one in the drawer.
But yeah in the future I will defintly get something better.
Also I did learn how to directly read and write Chips on the mainboard so the time spent wasn't totally wasted.
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That's fucking rough! Crappily produced electronics are a plague.
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My guess is that the factories manufacturing the storage chips are making money on the side by selling off chips tuat failed quality control to companies that make these cheap USB drives or the factory is meaking the cheap USB drives themselves from the QC failed chips on the side and is selling them
It's also why you see a lot of rip off products from China because the factories line to make money on the side
https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/18/iphones-made-from-rejected-parts/
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They don't exactly fail the quality checks, they get binned into a lower grade. It's a common practice in many industries when reworking isn't possible or financially viable.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Consumers can save some money when they don't need top performance, the company gets some revenue, and the products don't go into a landfill right away.
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Steve Gibson recently created a small utility to test USB drives to see if they work and actually give you the store space they claim.
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Anything similar for Linux?
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I'd like to know as well, hopefully, I'll get a notification for leaving this comment 😝
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There's F3. I've never used it but it looks decent. https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/f3-usb-capacity-fake-usb-test-linux
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Yes, there is one called F3 (Fight Flash Fraud).
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Man, I haven't visited GRC in forever! Glad to see they're still killing it...
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44 comments
What, you expect the flash drives they hand out for free at trade shows to be decent quality?
They are intended to be used to distribute advertising materials, not be rewritten multiple times.
E-waste, I say no to these same as I say no to straws, or plastic forks for takeout.
A business card with a link to the content would be a lot less wasteful.
I remember some kid at a job fair in college handing out his resume on flash drives. I remember one of the booths saying “yeah, that’s not getting read.”
It'd be an awful security risk if they did. You can't trust that the USB stick contains the resume to begin with.
Since their brand is on it, yeah. I would expect that if the company wants my business, they wouldn't put their name on shit quality products. Especially if it can lead to their would-be customers losing data. It kind of baffles me that they think this is a good way to impress me.