Looking For a Cheap USB Flash Drive ?
Wait !! did you know buying a cheap USB flash
drive could be false economy.
Ever wonder why some of them are so cheap? I
found this out to my expense, after purchasing from a website,
8gb for £9 amazing value or so I though.
My initial problem began when I tried to copy
some movies onto the flash disk, I had 3 movies each was around
1.5gb, the first and second movies worked without a problem, but
with the third I was prompted to repair it, I clicked the
repair, but still no joy, so I deleted the file and copied over
another, still the same problem, I then tried copying over
another movie file, so 4 in total, the fourth one would simply
do nothing.
Next I re-formatted the drive again as FAT32,
tried the copying again, still the same problem.
Tried formatting as NTFS, but this failed
totally, causing the flash drives format to be shown as RAW.
A nice little tip for any flash drive is to
optimise it, this can be done from Device manager – to access
this right click on my computer – Properties – Hardware –
Device Manager – find the Disk Drives section – now you will see
your flash drive – Right click on this – select Properties –
Policies tab – and select Optimise for performance . NOTE
this option will increase the performance of the flash drive or
USB memory stick , but you must make sure the drive is removed
properly, by clicking on the safely remove hardware icon one the
bottom right of the screen in the taskbar notification area,
failure to do this can result in data loss or corrupt data.
After optimising the flash drive for
performance I then tried again to format and copy the files, but
still the same issue occurred, I then tried copying a formatting
from another computer to rule out USB problems.
After all this
the one thing I did notice however was copying files onto the
drive was fine until
 the
total size on the drive exceeded 4gb, no matter what I copied if
it kept the total size under 4gb it was fine over 4gb then I
started having the issues.
So this is what I
concluded, the drive was not really an 8gb, but a 4gb that had
somehow been altered, I then checked the total storage size of
the disk, and it was odd that it reported free space as 7.79gb
or 8,372,043,776 bytes which is substantially more than the
7.79gb.
I then run a
great little free utility called Barts Stuff Test v5.1.4, this
then confirmed the worst, that the drive was only capable of
storing 4gb, if you need to test via Barts then you can easily
find via Yahoo or Google, and once downloaded, extract the
files, make sure your flash drive is plugged in, run Barts and
add the path to the letter of your flash drive, then click
start.
As you can see on the image above the test took a while ,1 hour
42 to be precise, but it did give me ammo and enabled me to get
a refund from the retailer, who advised me that this type of
electronic component cannot be guaranteed by his supplier, which
was pretty worrying.
So if you find a
cheap USB flash
drive and you have problems with files becoming corrupt you may
have been sold a modified drive, sadly this problem is more
common than people realise, many do not even realise they have a
flash drive with an issue as many people never store files of
more than a gig at the most.
If you are looking to purchase a
cheap USB flash drive you just have to weigh up the options like
myself now, is your data worth more than £13, which is about the
difference in price between a cheap USB flash drive and one you
can rely on.
Search for more
on cheap USB flash drive issues
A cheap USB flash drive is more likely to give
problems
But any flash drive can fail, what can be done if the worst
happens?
Is your computer USB type 1 or 2
Did you know USB 1 is 9 times slower than 2, find out how to
upgrade your computers USB
computer adviser
cheap usb flash drive article |
