this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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I help out with a school activity for my kids and the organizer bought a bunch of 8 GB USB sticks off of Amazon for it, against my advice. We only needed a few hundred megs for the data, but some families had more than one kid in the group and needed 2x or 3x the data. 8 GB seemed to be the cheapest price point available in quantity at the time.
As we made the drives we found that some batches were always failing to copy properly. We then realized that it was always the batches with more data. After doing some forensic analysis, we determined that the entire batch of drives was only 512 MB of usable space, but still registered as 8 GB to the OS. Whenever the write went past that point, it corrupted files, but since the directory isn't stored in the same place, all the files would still show up in the directory list. It would only be when you opened the file that you would realize the data was gone.
I'm just glad I found it while we could still fix the problem by buying from a better source.
If anyone thinks they might have this issue in the future, or just wants to see if they might have a fake drive, GRC's ValiDrive was made specifically for this sort of task (testing for bad drives, but as part of a data recovery/maintenance task). Steve Gibson puts out quality software, and I can't recommend him enough.
His DNS checker is also excellent. And runs perfectly under WINE.