I learned something interesting last week, fortunately before I made my purchase.

I wanted an 8 GB flash drive to plug into my Honda's stereo system, so I went to eBay to find one that was inexpensive. In doing so, I came across a seller that was offering "Flash Drive Recovery" starting at $5.00. Wondering what was up with that, I did some followup research, and found out that the sale of bogus flash drives on eBay (and many other on-line sources) is positively endemic, to the point where the majority of flash drives sold are fraudulent.

What is happening is that an unscrupulous seller purchases 1 GB or 2 GB flash drives, relabels them as 8 GB or 16 GB or even 32 or 64 GB drives, and hacks the file allocation table so that if you do a "properties" listing on the drive it will show the labeled amount as available space. The flash drive will work just fine until you exceed the actual physical capacity of the drive, at which point it will then start over from the beginning, overwriting your earlier data without presenting any error messages. This goes on until it compromises the integrity of the file system, turning the flash drive into a Lego-sized brick.

A great deal more information about this can be found here.

What I learned is don't trust anybody selling flash drives at suspiciously low prices. For an 8 GB flash drive, anything under $16 is almost certainly bogus.

There is a highly recommended flash drive test program available here. Warning: This link will automatically download the program (213 KB zip file) the moment you click on it.

I ended up buying my 8 GB flash drive from this guy for $17.95 after seeing several references that he was trustworthy. (This link is for an auction that will expire in a week or so, so it will only work until eBay deletes the auction in what, 60 or 90 days?) Scroll down and watch his video...

Anyway, I thought I'd pass on what I learned. Maybe it's old news and you knew all about it already, but it was new to me.

tanstaafl.