What's an "upgraded" flash drive ?

I have read of upgraded USB flash drives which often do not meet specification re capacity and speed.

But what IS an "upgraded" flash drive ? Are they filled with duff chips ? How are such memory devices actually "upgraded" ? What is the process ? Are there any statistics about the actual vs nominal performance of such devices ?

Dumb_Question
30.May.2014

 

They're "knock-offs" or "doctored" flash drives which are modified to falsely represent their capacity. The name brand I've most often seen is SanDisk unfortunately. If you go beyond the actual capacity of the drive, irreparable corruption of your data occurs and you lose everything on the drive. You also can't reformat it. We've had a few issues with those "upgraded" flash drives show up here on the forums. There are a couple of utilities for checking flash drives posted on MG's and personally, I only get Kingston drives which are constructed to be immune to the "doctoring".

 

Thank you, mdonah.

Is one of those utilities H2TESTW ?

In fact I was not thinking of non-genuine branded items (selling these must be illegal in the US ?) - thanks for the warning - but unbranded items which openly acknowledge they may not meet nominal spec.
In fact, my reason for asking was could they in fact be useful and good value given some are so cheap, if one takes into account the (likely ?) limitations and caveats ? (always back up the data of course, and do not put anything valuable on any such device).

I was also curious abut the process of upgrading ? You imply that is basically a software technique where the devices are programmed to read a false capacity (of course this leads to possibility of devices with x GB of memory being programmed to read y GB where y>>x, with consequent saving of memory chip hardware). I would not mention upgrading if I were committing such a deliberate fraud, which makes me think that there is a genuine upgrading process that has been used to make (some) such devices.

Dumb_Question
30.May.2014

 

That H2TestW is, in fact, the defacto standard for testing flash drives. I use it myself. My question would be how can anyone but the manufacturer "upgrade" a flash drive? Is it possible to "squeeze" more out of a flash drive than it was originally designed for?

Could you please provide a link to one of these "upgraded" flash drives so I could take a better look?

 

Hi mdonah,

I have been searching on the internet for unbranded flash drives. They are available in bulk quantities from certain sellers in China, and in lesser quantites (one-off) on ebay only (unless you count comparative rarities such as
http://www.amazon.co.uk/INCLUDING-A...8&qid=1401556012&sr=8-12&keywords=electsgenie).
They are present on ebay in numbers, e.g.,
http://www.ebay.com/itm/64GB-64G-US...786?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e8c3b6d8a
or
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gold-Bar-Th...042?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item41819c3022
but it seems to be exclusively UK sellers who include warnings that the flash drive has been upgraded and consequently the capacity may be less than the nominal capacity. e.g.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/64GB-64-GB-..._Computing_FlashDrives_SM&hash=item43c749a695
or
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/64GB-USB-..._Computing_FlashDrives_SM&hash=item35d758f834

I hope the links work

Thanks to DavdGP for pointing out some speed considerations.

Dumb_Question
31.May.2014

 

I took a look at a couple of the links you posted (they work). At least they offer a return policy but, I'd still avoid them like the Bubonic Plague. You don't really know what you're getting. Stick with Kingston or PNY (they've got a good reputation as well).

The item descriptions state that the flash drives have been reformatted. Why would anyone need a third party to do this?:confused

 

Thanks for that mdonah.

Here's some more anecdotal reporting:
I was reading customer reviews about a particular such product on Amazon, (can't remember which one now) about half of the 40 reviews were bad (1 star), half very good (5 stars) [few in the middle ground]. I read only a few of the bad ones, from which it appeared that (as mdonah said) that they were 8GB hardware (which isn't to say that all of them worked reliably and as expected as 8GB flash drives), programmed to report 64GB. I did not read any of the 5* reviews, some may have only tested a small fraction of the headline capacity or some may even have been fully functional 64GB flash drives.

Dumb_Question
2.June.2014

 

Hey mdonah,

Do you know a site where I can download the most up-to-date version of
H2TESTW ? I know you have a version which seems to be dated 2008, and the softpedia site (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/H2testw.shtml) has one that was 'last updated' in 2010 and is 10KB larger than the version you have

I am surprised that this 'gold standard' piece of freeware isn't available through MG downloads !

Dumb_Question
3.June.2014

 

Unfortunately, I don't know of a more recent version of H2TESTW than the one from Softpedia. Softpedia says it's compatible with all versions of Windows from XP forward including 8.1. It doesn't appear to get updated very often but, then, I don't know that it needs to be for the type of analysis it does.

 

Thank you plodr. You always manage make useful contributions !

I hope this will be useful for some peeps out there.
If you have ever bought a 'fake' flash drive this article (or collection of articles) might explain how you can recover at least some of your investment by turning the drive into one which registers its true capacity, instead of the fake (higher) capacity - note the dates if you read any of following comments (mostly how do I fix such-and such drive)
http://www.myblog.bloggybloggy.com/category/fake-usb-key/

mdonah, in years gone by it seems that Kingston products from being made 'fake' - I assume that your information implies that this is no longer the case.

see also the page where got the link to mybloggybloggy from http://fightflashfraud.wordpress.co...ld-standard-in-detecting-fake-capacity-flash/ - again, note the date. Things can change in 6 years - the cost of flash drives has fallen from about £0.50/GB to <£0.30/GB in 32GB drives just in the last year for example (something like that anyway).

Dumb_Question
5.June.2014

 

Quite a while back, I purchased a mini CD with software on it for detecting fake flash drives after having been informed about such devices being offered on ebay. It contained H2TESTW and another utility, FDBENCH. I've attached a .ZIP archive of the entire CD if you're interested.