Technology

59589 readers

2910 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

602

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

99 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 0 points 9 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 9 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.