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More and more USB sticks and microSD cards are being made with dubious components — data recovery firm uncovers no-name, low-quality NAND inside many devices (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I haven't even found the need for a thumbdrive outside of flashing firmware and storage devices. All my documents are on google drive.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I use them for:

Music in my car
Moving files to my locked-down work PC
The (read only) OS drives for my Unraid NAS servers
Media for my parents to watch when they are away on vacation and can plug it into a hotel TV
General sneakernetting of large files

They definitely don't get as much use as before, but I'm still using them.

Edit: please don't downvote the person above me, they are only saying what is true for them :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Also in a business context you need them to play displays on screens at conferences usually.

And students I imagine will frequently use them to print documents at the library, or design students at the print shop

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.

The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.

In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Depends. on a 3x3 booth setup with just a screen on a pole with no connectivity - you don't want to run a cable to a laptop because you're using the table for product demos

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Don’t mean this rudely, struggling to find a way that doesn’t sound condescending because I know things can be different in different regions. Didn’t realise that still happened.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I think it "just depends" - not trying to dox myself here but at cloud provider conference at Caesars forum, las vegas in summer of last year this was the setup we had.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Yeah I agree. I have a drive running Ventoy and that's about it.

Also if I'm moving a lot of data. I'll use a NVMe enclosure to speed up the transfer instead of network.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Be sure to have backups and not that sole location. Same is true of any physical drive, but at least a drive failure might be recoverable. A cloud storage can just be gone one day.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think of "thumb drives" as portable SSD with USB. "Portable backup drives" have taken its place for me. Incredibly fast (NVMe SSD + USB-C), quite small (M2 card size + case), durable (same as thumb drives), growing sizes (1-2 TB affordable).

I keep my old flash drives for smaller things like bootable apps, fresh OS installs, firmware updates. I definitely have no need for mystery off-brand storage though.