Serious question on thumb drives (was Re: Maybe a deal on flash drives)

[Michael Semcheski]

On 9/15/07, Les <hlhowell at pacbell.net> wrote:
> Sometimes they are using counterfeit components.  The laws and
> enforcement there are changing, but up to the last couple of months, it
> was pretty much anything goes.  I don't know what the effect is on
> reliability, but I would expect it to be less than ideal, although for
> non-vital stuff it would probably be OK, if you could suffer an
> occasional loss of data.

When I read this, the first thing I thought of was bad caps and
capacitor plague.

Basically, there is a formula for making the electrolyte solution in
the capacitors.  A rival manufacturer used industrial espionage to
steal the formula, but didn't get it exactly right.  The result was a
formula that worked for three years or so, then stopped working.

So, when you buy the knock offs, you're not necessarily getting what
you think you're getting.

Of course, in the case of the bad caps, it was pretty much all of the
major computer manufacturers (e.g. HP and Dell) that ended up
unknowingly buying the bad product and putting it on motherboards.  To
their credit, they generally extended the warranty on these products
well beyond the original date once the problem became well known.