On 9/2/20 01:59, jim bell wrote:
Be VERY cautious about buying the larger-capacity USB drives, say 128 GB to 1 TB drives. Unless you buy a few name-brands, like PNY, Sandisk, Samsung, it looks like the majority of the devices are fake. What they do is to re-program the devices (which were probably weak or defective to begin with) to make it look like they have far more capacity than they really do. If you try to write to them, at some point they will simply over-write the much-smaller capacity that they really have, which might be 4 or 16 Gigabytes
There are free programs which check these devices to see if they actually have the capacity they claim.
Personally, I swear by Micro Center branded devices, they seem to be quite reliable for the price point. Not too long ago I rolled the dice with some no-name 16 GB disks from Amazon (at about the same price point as Micro Center's media) I was intending to use as boot media, and other than being rather slow even for USB 2.0 and identifying as "VendorCo ProductCode" they are decent. I'm hearing modern DVD+R/DVD-R media can be a bit more finicky, though, particularly the dual layer variants. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@rushpost.com> http://www.rantroulette.com http://www.skqrecordquest.com