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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 8 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The company says that in its business, it's finding more and more devices with cut-down memory chips with manufacturer names removed

Removing the identification from the top of ICs isn't that uncommon

Clearly discarded and unrecognizable microSD cards are also soldered onto a USB stick and managed with the external one on the USB stick board instead of the microSD's internal controller

This makes sense, the memory controller on uSD card doesn't normally do wear levelling and stuff that a larger flash drive does.

These chips are not completely broken, but CBL notes they come with reduced storage capacity, implying that reducing capacity was how they were salvaged.

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

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 0 points 8 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.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 1 points 8 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.

[–] ridethisbike@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago

Bro you need to quit trying to justify the scammers work