Hands up anyone that's used a USB stick in the past couple of years and found it to be a bit rubbish, or defective right out of the packaging? Yep, me too. The good news is it's not just us, as German data recovery specialist CBL has found that over the past year an alarming number of USB drives dismantled by the company have been discovered to be using inferior and often defective memory chips.
The company suspects that memory chips that had previously failed to pass inspection from big manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix and Sandisk are being repurposed in the defective devices (via The Register), and has found multiple examples of chips with logos scrubbed from the casing, or crudely stamped over to hide the original source of origin.
