I thought I’d do a quick teardown on a generic 4GB USB thumbdrive that stopped working, I was given this drive to be destroyed.
When inserting the thumbdrive it would recognise it however it would ask to insert a disk when clicking on the volume, so let’s open it up.
It was very easy to open up and upon first glance the build quality doesn’t seem too great but then again it’s a generic USB drive. We can see that it seems PCB wasn’t exactly made for the case which is why they have the glue to hold it in place.
On the back we can see the memory which is Apple branded, you don’t see that everyday.
On closer examination, it seems that the left hand side of the memory is slightly lifted off the PCB which should explain why we had that insert disk error before. There some residue on/around the memory as well. Could it be that this memory was taken off another device and re-purposed for this USB drive?
Now let’s have a look at a Toshiba 4GB USB drive.
The PCB fits the case nicely and the build quality looks good.
I guess in the end it’s up to the user as to whether they want to take a risk with the generic USB drive.
I’ve had about 20 in sizes up to 16Gig from when they first became available up to today . I always buy on price and can say so far I have not had a bad one . All are going strong without error . I would say this problem is rare Alex and I wonder what brand it had on it ?
Yeah, it probably would be rare but there would be a higher chance of it failing than a good quality one. I won’t name names but it was one of those generic ones that you buy from office supply shops that have their logo on it.
Hello, I would like to know if you have images of the Kingston Data traveler elite g2 pendrive? What about the Super Sonic Rege elite flash drive?