My dad gifted me this 16GB USB stick a couple of years ago and it worked perfectly fine. Recently none of my PCs could access it, so I decided to take it apart. The results were… interesting.
Here’s how it looked before I disassembled it (image courtesy of discounto.de):
I was using this drive to watch Futurama at work while on a lunch-break, but looks like I’ll have to find something else to do now. I unplugged it from the TV, attached it to my work PC and it couldn’t access it at all. Took it home, same with my laptop and tablet (which has USB OTG). Furthermore, is was getting noticeably warm after about 1 minute of being plugged in. Short-circuit? Probably. Took it apart and this is what I saw:
Uhm… A micro SD card?! Well, that’s underwhelming. The other side looks like this:
The marking of the chip reads:
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Which turns out to be a USB Flash Disk Controller, most likely a discontinued one.
A 16GB class 4 high capacity micro SD card has it’s manufacturer name removed (or it was never there, who knows). The text below “16GB” is:
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Honestly, I was surprised. Didn’t expect to see this thing inside. Interesting that they claimed that this was capable of 12 MB/s read speed, while a class 4 has a maximum of, you guessed it, 4 MB/s.
The moral of the story is: buy USB flash drives from well-known companies.