Looking For a Cheap USB Flash Drive ?

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.

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 flash drive you just have to weigh up the options like myself now, is your data worth more than £13, which is the difference in price between a cheap USB flash drive and one you can rely on.

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

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