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February 11, 2009
Pen Drive storage devices have proved themselves to be a very practical and robust mobile storage method, far surpassing anything that has gone before. For the most part these devices are very reliable as they rely on solid state technology and therefore have no moving parts, which is a big bonus.
Unfortunately recently there has been a massive increase in the failure rate of these previously ultra reliable USB devices, so much so that the data recovery sector is now placing a lot of emphasis and time on USB memory stick recovery. The question has to be asked however what is the problem all of a sudden?
As with any storage technology over time costs drop and adoption increases and the humble USB memory stick is testament to this paradigm. From the time the technology went mainstream it has had a massive growth rate and recent years have seen a doubling of sales year on year . The expectation for the end of this year is expected top be circa three hundred million.
With the higher number of units in the market place it goes without saying that that the actual physical numbers of failures of portable storage devices will increase, double the units = double the failures. However along side the number of failing units of more concern is the increase in the ratio of failed units that is being seen.
When a previously very reliable product starts to have increased failure rate, just as in any industry the repairers (in this case the data recovery companies) start to ask why and often collaborate on their findings. Investigations have started to reveal that the actual memory chips in the drives have not failed at all and are working just as expected.
The failures are normally attributed to poor manufacture quality by mushroom companies in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. These devices often make their way on to the market as unbranded devices, however there are huge problems with fake devices.
Such devices often misidentify the actual size of the Memory Storage that they provide, they use poor quality components including cheap crystals and microcontrollers. Whilst they work fine for a short period, when they fail or the available storage room is filled, problems almost always occur, these problems often feature data loss or corruption.
Often These portable devices will hold a lot of your valuable data that if lost and not backed up could be lost forever. You get what you pay for as the saying goes so is it really worth the increased risk of data loss to save what is in reality a tiny sum compared to the cost of a branded device?
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