On 28 May 2013, at 8:30pm, Richard Hipp <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Ryan Johnson > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Cheap (aka counterfeit) flash drives are notorious for advertizing more >> space to the OS than they actually have, and so at some point writes start >> to silently erase data that was written earlier. > > I've heard the same thing, except that the counterfeit flash drives are not > necessarily inexpensive. They are just counterfeits.
My department ordered 500 low-capacity Pen Drives with our department logo on. The price was reasonable and we're part of a big organisation with a big name and big lawyers. I see no reason Purchasing should have gone to some noname dodgy cheap Chinese supplier. The drives came pre-loaded with our advertising material (PDFs, HTML, etc.) but were left writeable, with the intention that our potential recruits would use them for the next year or two and carry our logo around with them. Nobody thought to ask me (I'm theoretically in charge of tech) or even tell me about the order. These drives were terrible. About one in 20 you couldn't even get our own material off of without a sector failure. I picked up some that passed that test and us techies used them around the office for the next month. I don't think any of them stood up to more than a couple of weeks without sector faults, disk IO errors, and all that stuff. They had the right capacity, I think they just had very low-quality soldering and any heat expansion ruined them. Or maybe they'd used chips which failed testing. Of course, the company that supplied them were happy to replace any specific drives we returned as broken, but refused to replace the who lot, or return our money. I toyed with the idea of returning one drive a day, every working day for the next two years. But I settled for having my boss wave my job description under the noses of several other people in our department. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list [email protected] http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
