Stop buying cheap, no-name SSD drives – here's why

The other day, an acquaintance mentioned in passing that a storage drive they had been using to keep backups had “gone funny,” and it was “kinda important” because it apparently contained some data needed for a job. It had gone “really, painfully slow” before dying, but they added that “it has always been sluggish and unreliable.”

Just what you want from a storage drive.

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Modern storage drives are reliable, right?

Since they didn’t live too far, I suggested they drop it off. I’d take a look at it, and I might be able to recover the lost data.

After all, modern storage drives are quite reliable, and most of the time, when they go funny, it’s because of some file structure glitch.

I was hopeful — right up until the moment I saw the drive.

According to the printing on the drive, it was a “Moblle Sdud State” SSD.

LOL

You know when you want to laugh out loud, but at the same time, you try to remain professional, and your face says it all? Yeah, that was me when I saw this.

According to the owner, the drive was “a 128 terabytes, or gigabytes,” but looking at it, I was convinced it wasn’t either. I suspected it either contained a microSD drive (yup, unscrupulous manufacturers stuff a microSD card reader — complete with a microSD card — into a case and sell them as “SSDs”), or it was a USB flash drive chip.

I popped the drive open and found the latter. About as basic as you can get.

The storage chip had a few numbers on it, but they didn’t pull up anything useful — no data sheet, no specifications — only a Russian YouTube video of someone having issues with a USB flash drive.

The drive was dead

Nothing happened when it was connected. It was completely unresponsive. I examined the drive under a microscope to look for damage, even found an identical drive online for $10, and used an air gun to lift the memory chip from the dead drive and solder it into the replacement drive — all without success.

It was completely dead.

Short of sending the drive to one of those expensive data recovery firms (I was assured the data on the drive wasn’t that important), it was gone.

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It’s also odd that the manual for the drive seems to talk about it being compatible with M.2 drives. Maybe it was the manual for something else

Cheap storage drives are a no from me

And this is why I’m completely against cheap storage drives (and USB flash drives, SD cards, and microSD cards, for that matter) from no-name manufacturers. They usually make use of poor-quality chips — oftentimes seconds — and they’ve been doctored to appear as though they have more storage than they actually do.

If you’ve got data worth storing, at least do yourself a favor and buy something decent. Sure, it’s going to cost more than $10, but not by much. For example, this 500GB Buffalo external SSD is currently available for under $40.