3 February 2026 @ 4:35 pm
I have accumulated a lot of USB flash drives that are broken, but are still detected in the system. And they are all united by the following problem - they corrupt files. That is, I write a file to a flash drive, compare it with the original and see a discrepancy. No read errors are thrown! It simply reads actual garbage data mixed with what remains of the original file. I noticed this behavior on flash drives from 2005 to the present day, i.e. almost all possible!
This happened to me on very different computers, Windows 7-10.
I have never noticed anything like this on 5.25, 3.5 floppies, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, any hard drives. There, if the file is damaged, it will not be read, the system will generate a reading error! Never, never will garbage be returned instead of a file!
In this regard, I have a question: do USB flash drives even have sector checksums? Or what is read is given to the user, and errors are completely ignored? This is incredibly cruel, especially