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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/7evenate9ine on 2024-01-15 10:39:05+00:00.
I've been finding lots of people online with this situation. They have a Micro Center flash drive (mostly 16GB or 32GB) with what seems to be a black cover for the internal components and no activity light. I got a 5 pack of these from Amazon a couple of years ago and just recently opened the pack and noticed this issue. So I broke open one of the USB drives. It's not a black cover for the internal components, it's a mock circuit board. It's just a peace of plastic with a notch. But the drive formats to 14.4GB and stores data, how much I dont know, I only put a 6GB image in this drive with no problems. So I kept taking it apart and found that all the circuitry is in one chip mounted directly to the copper USB contacts. All the electronics mount inside of the metal USB connector, but they still went to the trouble of making it look like all the other 16GB drives that have a real circuit board and activity light. The performance of this single chip flash drives is lower than the drives I have with complete circuit boards. These single chip drives read at 29MBps and write at 9MBps, the full drives with an activity light Read and Write at 29MBps. There seems to be a serial number on the metal connector that is consistent with Micro Center flash drives. This is kind of a shocking surprise. I understand the Micro Center makes the cheapest flash drives you can get, as such consistency could be an issue, but this is jarring. It makes one wonder if the drives are fake or just made by the lowest bidder that Micro Center could find. I see that some people get write protection errors when they have a drive like this. I've always had a good experience with MC flash drives, as cheap as they are, they've always taken a beating and worked beyond expectations for such budget drives. Not sure what to make of this. Has anyone else gotten one of these drives with the black, mock circuity board inside and no activity light? Where did you get it from? Are you getting the write protection errors? Can we get someone from Micro Center to give us some info on this? If they are legit, I can live with the 9MBps write speed, but more info on this weirdness would be great.
