Crap Flash Drives

You didn't say how much you paid for them. But from guessing, it's 2x 512G for less than $50. You got what you paid for.

In the end I paid nothing. What should these drives cost?

A good half-terabyte M.2 NVMe drive is about $50, and has four lanes (4x faster than USB-C). Add $20 for a USB interface and case, if you want it external and portable. USB cable extra.

On a sunny day (Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:46:01 -0700 (PDT)) it happened whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

I payed about 95 Euro (say 95 USD these days) for a Toshiba Canvio Basics 4 TB external USB harddisc. I now have 2 connected to my Raspberry Pi4s. One runs 24/7 since December 2020 recording security cams and some other stuff. I do not see the point of large FLASH drives, but I have 32 GB and 64 GB Samsung micro sdcards everywhere. Samsung has not failed me until today.

I think you mean add nothing for the USB interface and $1 for the "case". This was a USB memory stick, not a hard drive replacement. But thanks for the $50 figure. In the meantime I've wiped an old drive that was storing stuff I don't need anymore.

I took a look at higher capacity drives on Amazon, and I see no clear demarcation between crap drives and useful drives. So pricing is not a useful criterion for distinction. I did see a number of Micro Center drives, but nothing above 64 GB. I'll wait until I'm in a Micro Center again. I've never had any trouble with their drives, although I'm sure they are just basic drives, at least they aren't crap.

On Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:19:31 -0700 (PDT), Ricky snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote as underneath :

Ok so just partition them to the correct size or slightly less as reported true by h2testw, they wont overwrite files then - and label them never to be reformattted in the normal way and you have useful free drives for unimportant stuff! I have number of TF cards like that for free and they have been reliable for years! I name them with NOFORMAT in the volume name.. C+

+1 There is a reason why the largest drives cost more.

I have never had any bother with any of Integral, Samsung, Toshiba or my favourite SanDisk drives in terms of either rated speed (when correctly formatted), capacity or reliability. Maybe I am just lucky.

USB 3.0 128GB presently ~£16 UK.256GB ~£27 and 512GB ~£50.

Come to that I have yet to see one of the ultra cheap 4/8GB ones I buy for sending things to friends fail either. Smaller ones tend not to lie about their capacity and work well enough not to worry about.

I tried a microSD card with 1 TB for $10-ish, and a USB dock for it for about $1. The SD card, with the same h2testw, actually got to day two of testing (about 300GB) before it faulted. It's not a mislabeled item, or complete fraud, just a low-reliability card (this was Xiaomi brand, and less return-able than an Amazon purchase).

For some applications, it might even be useful.

The M.2 drives, though, are price and performance winners; a fast USB interface is less mass-producible than the card edge M.2 NVMe form factor. NVMe needs case, power regulator, and controller interface to talk USB.

Samsung 850 PRO and 860 PRO drives have proven to be extremely reliable. The nice thing about them (and others) in the 2.5" form factor is that they have nice housings so for external use they just need a USB to SATA cable and no extra housing. They are not as fast as nvme M.2 of course. However, for some reason the

860 PRO drives seem to be very expensive at the moment. I have bought several of both types from eBay with no problems at all. Most users get nowhere near the rated maximum writes and even then there seems to be plenty of headroom.

John

It's pretty inconceivable that a 1TB drive could be sold for $10 unless it used defective chips (rejects). One way or the other, this is a fake part.

If you have absolutely no concern about it continuing to work or store data. I suppose there are uses where it only needs to store data for a short time.

Unfortunately, no matter how good a NVMe interface is, it won't fit a USB socket.

well your time spent is worth money, eh, Rick? Losing an hour of your time could easily out-cost those purchases :-)

I try to use "name brand" product. And ignore user reviews.

How do you know these were not name brand? The counterfeiters mark up the capacity of flash drives. They do that with any brand. If there were a break point with lots of options at or above and few below, I would say those below are counterfeit. But there's no longer a discernible break point. Unless you know the "fair" price of a flash drive, you have nothing to go on.

I've never tested the waters extensively, but it's possible they know no shame and sell the counterfeits at the "fair" price as well.

Rick's life seems to be centered on cheap. He said his dad was like that too. Could be hereditary.

I got two of these supposedly 2 TB sticks. They were definitely fake. I was stupid for even thinking you could get a 2TB stick for under $75. I'm not sure you can even get one for $750 ??

boB

Real 1/2TB is around $50 to $100. 1TB $100 to $150. 2TB $150 to $200.

Of course, fakes and rejects from the "Land of Cheap Lies" are available for much less. $10 TB are as real as $1 9800mAhr 18650.

John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com Wrote in message:r

I stay away from 'cheep', you waste too much time trying to make it work.

Cheers

That's the problem. The quality is not related to the price. That's why I test all the flash devices I buy, regardless of price.

Ah OK so youre looking for intersection of

- 100% reliability,

- accurately-stated capacity,

- and low purchase price. Those requirements tend to correlate with established brands of product, and reputable vendors. User reviews on a platform like Amazon, are poor indicators of those factors. (research studies supports that). Of course I respect your desire to "test the marketplace" and challenge these things :-)

I recently bought a couple of 1Tbyte SSDs (Samsung 850 PRO) on eBay. One of the suppliers was impatient for feedback. I told him to wait until I had written a few Tbytes of random data and verified it (after updating the firmware and using the Samsung diagnostics to check for fakes). Both suppliers had two drives for sale, but I bought one from each to reduce the risk of correlated problems in a RAID array. Both had been heavily used, but still had more than 90% of their rated life left. I see this as getting somebody else to do the burn-in testing for me! One interesting issue that I came across was that one of the drives initially had a much lower write speed than normal. It recovered after I had written data to all locations. I think it must have been in a system without TRIM activated, so every write needed an erase first.

John