The quality of micro SD cards and USB flash drives is not as good as before, and the quality of components in both is declining. A new study finds that an increasing number of devices are using NAND chips with reduced capacity and the manufacturer's logo removed, while some USB flash drives use an old trick of soldering a microSD card onto the circuit board.
A report by German data recovery company CBL believes that NAND chips with substandard quality control produced by well-known manufacturers such as Hynix, SanDisk or Samsung are being resold and reused. While the chips still work, the storage capacity is reduced.
"Last year, when we opened the defective USB flash drive, we found a large number of inferior memory chips with reduced capacity and the manufacturer's logo on the chip had been removed." Conrad Heinicke, general manager of CBL Datenrettung GmbH, explained: "Apparently, discarded, unrecognizable microSD cards were also soldered to the USB flash drive and were managed by an external controller on the USB flash drive board instead of the microSD's internal controller.
Most of the low-quality USB flash drives CBL investigated were promotional gifts, i.e. free gifts given with products or given by companies at conferences. However, there are some "branded" products that are equally inferior, but CBL doesn't specify whether these are well-known mainstream brands or brands you may have never heard of.
Technological advances have also had an impact on these NAND chips, but not in a positive way. These chips initially used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells, each storing only one bit, resulting in lower data density but better performance and reliability. To increase the memory capacity of chips, manufacturers began switching to four bits per cell (QLC), which reduced endurance and retention. Coupled with component issues, this is why CBL warns: "You should not rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."
The report explains how some components found in these devices had their manufacturer names obscured or removed. One simply had text printed above the company name, while the other had it completely erased. There is also a photo of a microSD card found in a USB flash drive, with all identifying marks removed from the card.
Be careful when choosing storage equipment, and be especially wary of deals that seem too good to be true. As early as 2022, there was a 30TBM.2 external solid-state drive on the Walmart website, priced at about $18. It's actually two 512MB SD cards stuck to a circuit board with hot glue, and their firmware has been modified to report each card as 15TB. Last year there was also an incident of counterfeit Samsung SSDs that were incredibly slow.