BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?

Subject: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 08:25 AM

on ebay.co.uk from this company and available in red (other colours available)

The march of progress (aka Moore's Law) is surprising even me!

It is USB 2 so is slow to respond, given the capacity not unsurprising, but as backup in yer pocket, gotta be good.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 08:30 AM

spelling mistook - 1/2 Tb

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: gnu
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 09:58 AM

Wow! Seems unreal.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: gnu
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 10:08 AM

1Tb... CDN$1,499.00. 1/2Tb... $699.00.

http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#DTHXP30

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 11:06 AM

I bought a cheap 1/2 Tb memory stick. It ate vital backups. It cost me £700 to have a data recovery company try unsuccessfully to get the data back off my hard drives. Never again.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: Joe_F
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 04:14 PM

My 32-Gbyte Toshiba thumb drives cost about $20 apiece at MicroCenter. I use 4 of them for backups: (last month, this month) X (odd days, even days). They have all my business & personal files since 1986. They have proven reliable so far. (The Verbatim ones I used for a while did go bad.) At the end of the month I copy the last day's backup onto a DVD-R.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Gb in a memory stick?
From: GUEST,Musket smiling
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 06:42 PM

Your data was possibly already corrupt before you backed it up Bridge.

😂😂😂

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: gnu
Date: 15 Jul 15 - 07:39 PM

4 for backups. I gotta learn how to do that!

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: GUEST,saulgoldie
Date: 16 Jul 15 - 12:50 PM

Half TB is large for today. Best to wait for someone else--sorry Richard--to have troubles and the manufacturers figure out what went wrong and get it right.

Tech *seldom* gets it 100% on the first try. Always take a dry run in a safe environment where you can't do any unrecoverable damage. And even once you put [whatever] into service, always have a "plan B."

And whatever you do, ever, if you are buying tech, and it indicates "made in China" be extra special careful and anticipate anything possibly going wrong with it. Fortnuately, I didn't get hurt badly. But I recently bought some higher capacity Chinese flash drives. And they did not behave the way they should have. No Chinese drives for me ever again.

Saul

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: gnu
Date: 16 Jul 15 - 01:25 PM

So... where are the good drives made and by whom?

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 16 Jul 15 - 02:54 PM

Not as corrupt as you Mither.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: GUEST,Musket laughing
Date: 16 Jul 15 - 04:40 PM

Aye, but my documents don't cause plastic to melt duck!

Use your ill gotten gains to commission professional IT. Solicitors can afford it.

After all, in Etihad First Class last month, three people at the bar were solicitors.

Tsk. You pay first class to get away from the bloody leeches. They are what we have business class for. Presumably some poor sod like me was paying for their flight ultimately.

You advertise how you lay staff off to invest in IT and pass on the discount to rich clients. I'd have kept that quiet if I were thee.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: Bill D
Date: 17 Jul 15 - 12:34 PM

Among the 'good' drives... Cruzer Blade by Sandisk

I have two.. 'only' 16 gigs... with privacy software included. I have a 32 gig as a gift from Microcenter for being a good customer, but it is a generic brand. For serious backups, I use external hard drives.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 17 Jul 15 - 01:33 PM

Well my main repository 1Tb disk is e-SATAP and backup is also 1 Tb (CD tray slot) so they are nearly as fast/faster than USB3. But at about the cost of 5 cups of regular Americano (whatever that is - I drink black coffee 1/2 strength) I figure anything  red  is worthy of me going without coffee for a few days. We will see how reliable it is. I was never expecting perfection, only hoping.

Thanks to Joe Clones for correcting the tittle (sic).

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: GUEST,Musket adding to thread
Date: 18 Jul 15 - 02:56 AM

Bearing in mind that one brand can be good in one type of machine and bad in another, I found the following;

I use a 32gb stick in my car for music. Mrs Musket too. We occasionally swap cars and both being sad people, move our memory sticks with us as our musical tastes are sometimes different.

My car behaves with a Kingston but crashes occasionally with a Santa Cruz whilst her car has never had Santa Cruz problems. We have two of each so we can update playlists at home and not drive off sans entertainment, so not really a rogue stick issue.

My point is that whatever you plug them into may be choosy.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: Nick
Date: 18 Jul 15 - 09:06 PM

Do not touch these flash drives with a barge pole.

They are hacked and rubbish. At best they have 6.5GB on them but - as they would constantly overwrite the same sectors of space - are useless.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 Tb in a memory stick?
From: Bill D
Date: 18 Jul 15 - 10:04 PM

"these"?? What drives are you talking about? "hacked"??

You give no explanation as to what you mean or how you learned all that.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Nick
Date: 19 Jul 15 - 05:18 AM

I am referring to the flash drives sold by ebay from the original poster.

We thought we would have some fun and get one as the ebay says refunds etc so very little risk

So bought a 512gb one (ho!ho!) and ran h2testw and RMPrepUSB on it. Hacked/fake USB It says it is 500GB
It 'appears' to write 500 1gb files to the drive and indeed you can browse it from a cmd window and it 'appears' to have 500 1gb files.

Only it hasn't...

As soon as it tries to verify it fails after 6.5gb and the rest is either corrupt or fails.

Scam artist. I will report him to ebay once I get the money back

OK Bill?

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Nick
Date: 19 Jul 15 - 05:30 AM

I also looked back at other USBs I have and another one is dodgy too only I have never put too much on it

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 19 Jul 15 - 07:08 AM

The hacks I would be most concerned about are things that might be snooping.

Interesting, because every USB 2.0 memory stick I load new needs to install software, which is a bit of a vector for fraud. we will see, I have enough ISO DVD images that might reach 6.5 Gb which seems to be the point where it will be obvious. The thing is that a UK vendor is subject to UK Trading Standards Law, so we will see.

I may be some time.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Bill D
Date: 19 Jul 15 - 10:12 AM

Thank you, Nick... there were just too many posts between the OP & yours to make the connection.

Mr. Red.... I see messages about USB 2.0 sticks saying "Your new hardware is installed and ready to use>".... and the Cruzer Blades I have include some security/encryption software, but I have not used it, and see no indication they are installing anything. I also have a Kingston and an HP, and no automatic software with them either. What brands are you trying?

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Nick
Date: 19 Jul 15 - 11:03 AM

From the seller - LOL. Heap of bollocks but sensible enough to refund the postage :)

Good Morning,

Thank You for your message regarding your recent purchase.

I am not sure if you have read the item description and specifications correctly which do mention this particular item has not passed quality control tests with the manufacturer hence the budget price, therefore the usable capacity can vary from 8-512GB. As we can not guarantee what the usable capacity may be errors may occur once this is reached which require a full format.

We are more than happy to exchange your item for a full refund and we can also provide a prepaid return envelope so this can be returned at no cost to yourself.

My apologies for any trouble or confusion this may have caused.

I shall await your response.

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 20 Jul 15 - 04:36 AM

Bill D
As I see it, USB 1 was a very simple interface. In upgrading to 2.0/2.2 the capacities got larger and the process of writing to the NMOS chips got cleverer to make the internals faster or more reliable, ie redundant chips and address re-defining. Sticks these days are microprocessors in themselves.
In order to inform the PC (or radio/device) what it is doing, some information is passed which is stored on the PC or is read each time - what they call "installed". The second time it reads but you may not get the "installed" message.
My interpretation of the "information passed" includes anything akin to a DLL or executable software.

Wiki says:
Unicode ECN: Released in February 2005.
   This ECN specifies that strings are encoded using UTF-16LE. USB 2.0 specified Unicode, but did not specify the encoding.
Inter-Chip USB Supplement: Released in March 2006
    On-The-Go Supplement 1.3: Released in December 2006.
USB On-The-Go makes it possible for two USB devices to communicate with each other without requiring a separate USB host. In practice, one of the USB devices acts as a host for the other device.

all done by its internal micro-processor.
The type of encoding and some information about the manufacturer (or a stick using someone's formats) is certainly passed and retained. Hence the possibility that some receiving gizmos can't read all those differing formats.

FWIW My 512Gb tops-out at 27.7 Gb. So the price is about right for 32 Gb in red.
Interestingly there is a rather large reported used space which I would assume is the software to falsify the claimed capacity. The vendor withdrew the listing on E-Bay but re-did the same that now (now) has a disclaimer about "untested". So the original lack of such information cannot be proven by the 2500 already sold! We will see. In normal usage most people would not discover the problem for years and assume it had failed in use.
Beware, some fake devices overwrite files in order to justify the claimed capacity. On my stick the files are reported as present but effectively not there hence no thumbnail image.
my screen dumps of the problemo

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Nick
Date: 20 Jul 15 - 05:06 AM

I would be incredibly careful as to what you use it for as there is a high likelihood from what I have read that sticks which have been amended to falsify their capacity are likely also to be substandard and may have problems over and above. Personally I would not trust it to safely hold info so have gone for the refund option.

It was fun though and I will get in touch with ebay once the money is returned and report him. He is well aware of what he is selling and there is NO way in the world that he is an innocent selling storage that might be 512GB!

Subject: RE: BS: 1/2 terabyte in a memory stick?
From: Mr Red
Date: 20 Jul 15 - 06:57 AM

From my early e-mails with the vendor - they anticipated some folks would be wary of what is a "too good to be true" offer. But there are black 512 Gb sticks that look to be from the same origin at 2.5 times the price. It makes one wonder what limitations prevail there. I was really buying red , so haven't decided if I want to return it or use it as a bit of humour. We will see what the vendor replies, they responded within an hour on a Sunday night. I will read it tonight.