1 word: duh.

dollar store items are cheap for a reason

True, but most crap I buy at Dollarama is perfectly good crap. Not great crap, but if it says it will open a bottle, or erase pencil, it will open bottles and erase pencil. These particular pieces of crap are good for nothing but throwing at the pigeons or fooling squirrels.

3 dollar usb stick and you expect it to last or work properly.. GG..

what people dont understand about technology is you get what you pay for. unless a very specific part is on sale at a reputable source, you dont buy anything because its cheaper.

O got one that works perfectly. Idk some work some dont

Apparently a great many don't -- there's a page of complaints about these items on-line.

Thanks for the warning. I'll keep that in mind.

I usually stick with SansDisk flash drives for the most part for saving files.

I usually buy household goods and the occasional cheap snack bag at dollar stores for the most part. Beware technology goods (and food from unknown brands) at dollar stores.

The actual USB sticks I rely on are from WalMart and work just fine. Dollar for dollar, Gig for Gig, they even work out cheaper. But I was hoping these would work reasonable well as a means of mailing bulk files -- I don't want to spend $12 to $15 every time I want to mail someone a gig or so of data.

I live in a city without a Wal-Mart close-by. Pro-Union, Progressive and Affluent-based politicans in charge to keep Wal-Mart out for a long while. Grumble.

The local membership warehouse chain Costco had 3 SanDisk 16GB flash drives in one mega package selling for about $25 but I don't see them in recent months. The Best Buy store chain sells 16GB flash drives at decent prices at times (Hewlett Packard). The mega office supply chain shops have storage sticks at prices ranging from decent to ridiculous.

Of all of the flash drives I owned, one had corrupted data after using it for two years...managed to salvage some of the files while others were lost. So far so good for the SanDisk...still in good shape after 4 years in use.

I don't use flash drives for permanent storage of vital data. In fact, most of the ones I have are currently blank. One has a lot of music on it because it's convenient to plug in and play, and doesn't use up my hard drive space. If it corrupts -- I can easily write the files over it again.

I've seen fake SD cards that claim to be a certain size (like, say, 32GB) but really only have a small amount of memory (like 2GB). Except they report having 32GB to anything reading it, so they just overwrite the storage and corrupt files. You might want to try using h2testw to check your stick, though if you've already had corruption issues, it's probably going to confirm the stick is indeed not good. You could use the tool to check other sticks in the future to verify them before you start using them, if you like.

While finding out about the Dollarama sticks, I also read about out-and-out fakes -- just a blinking LED in a plastic case.

Also things like putting bits of scrap metal into a case for weight, for things like external hard drives. You think you're getting a 500GB hard drive, but it's really just a small USB drive and some extra weight. You connect it to the computer, it sees a drive, claims it has 500GB storage, but when you actually go to use it, it fails. And by then, the seller is gone.

Hopefully you didn't lose anything you couldn't replace or have a backup of. It sucks getting burned like this, but at least you aren't out a lot, right? I'd still pursue a refund if possible, but even if it doesn't work out, it's not too bad, hopefully. The biggest thing to remember is that it isn't your fault. It's easy to slip into a mindset of "You get what you pay for", but you didn't get what you paid for. You paid for a working USB memory stick, and got a defective product.

Nah. I was just trying the stick with some copied files, to see if it would work. I wasn't expecting much, and got less, but lost nothing.

I bought a $50 32GB one of those
The company i bought it from has very strict no refund policy
As a consolation they gave me a 25 pack of 2GB drives
So now i have a bag of brocken usb drives

I once got one for free for filling out a survey at a store. It didn't even survive being reformatted X3

You get what you pay for. I get my flash drives from Staples when they send me a sales coupon.

Actually, I didn't get what I paid for ... I got nothing. $3 for one gig seemed fair, not super cheap.

ITT: People with money and a holier-than-thou attitude.

Indeed. To heck with things like fraud, false advertising, and not honoring warranties.

Dude, none of that has anything to do with a bunch of people essentially saying, "You should've spent more money, I guess you got what you paid for, too bad so sad." Buying cheap stuff carries an implicit risk, but not all of us can drop $20 on a whim.

Floober boobers, 1 gb flash drive with 8mb actual, you got taken

I go through Fry's Electronics where I get good memory sticks under $10.......

Yeah I really scored last Christmas when Radioshack had all of their sandisk thumbdrives on sale for really cheap. Prices might have been elevated for the sale but they listed at around $20, and after a bad experience with an $8 card from Target I swore I wouldn't get anything unless it was either crucial or sandisk. Been using one now as part of my start up and it's been running fine. It seems to just come down to buying name brand (or checking online first) and catching sales. I think Amazon regularly discounts thumbdrives too.

They use 'second' memory ICs. A 4Gig stick might actually have a factory failed 32gig chip in it, limited in size by an onboard controller that -hopefully- picks a working 4 gig chunk to work with.
But there is no guarentee of that at all.
I've had the same with cheapy knockoff MP3 players, bought a 16gig and it worked for a few months, then dropped to 8gig.. then to 4, and I had to drop everything on at once because adding or removing files would corrupt the lot.
Still... it was cheap, and it still sorta works.
Really though, if you want cheap USB memory, get a USB micro-sd card reader and stick a card in it. Last I checked a microsd 32gig was about half the price of a 32gig USB stick.

Yeah, since everything uses SD cards, I just started using micro readers. At least when the thing dies or you upgrade the internal, you've got a new drive.

Geez bud, if you needed a stick, I know a place or two that has decent ones for cheap :B

I can get a 16 GB for $ 12 !

This is a common remark, and in fact I have a number of drives -- 8 gig, 16 gig and 32 gig (even one venerable old .512 gig). What I thought the 3 gig drive might have been useful for is sending a large amount of art to people -- most people's account's won't let you send them more than 20 meg. I don't want to spend $15 and buy enough memory for my entire life's work, necessarily! But a CD ROM or DVD often won't do.

Have you tried online storage services like Mediafire?

I have a free account with them that reports something like 50GB of space (I'm only using about 140MB so far)

I use it to send large files and collections of .ZIPped images to commissioners. The service gives you a unique download link per file or folder that you can send to another user to download.

By the way, I have a 8GB drive that looks just like the ones you pictured, with the folding cover. Mine's by "Super Talent", and is one of a number I bought from computer-show vendors during the time 2-8GB thumb drives were the most common. None have failed or showed any unusual behavior yet.

They may look the same, but that doesn't mean they're the same inside. And it may be that Dollarama was sold factory rejects. The manufacturor could be selling the ones that passed inspection under their own brand name.

I don't want any storage services that cost me a a fee obviously. But I have reservations even about free storage space. It could vanish overnight, whenever the company decides to shut down or goes bankrupt. I also have only their word about it that they aren't data mining my files, or snooping for personal information.

Of course they're probably rejects. I thought it curious that this form factor showed up years after I bought the drive I have. Yes, it's China, and everyone copies everyone else and all that.

As for Mediafire, I don't keep anything there that I don't have local copies of. I really only use it for two reasons:

1: to send preview images to commissioners so I don't (a) clutter up my FA scraps with multiple WIPs and (b) to give some measure of exclusivity to the commissioner till the image is ready for display.

2: to send large image files (such as 300dpi bitmaps) to the commissioner and related WIPs + references as part of the package. I do have older files there, but its mostly out-of-sight out-of-mind. There's plenty of room so there wasn't any rush to delete sent items to make room for more. And lots of luck data-mining .BMPs of furries.

I prefer buy hard disks portatils of a terabits or 350 gigs that are better that a usb stick of 32gigs

I work for an imprinting company that uses a USB that is identical to that. We haven't heard any complaints or else we wouldn't be selling them still. We get them direct from the factory in China. What you got was most likely a cheep knockoff or rejects.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-2-5.....4ada547cd5have this cost $ 4.00 or http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-Inch-Sa.....IC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D31195%26meid%3Da79ee25260754307981f4ed1e8c042b8%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D321490549973&rt=nc have this cost $6.00 or this http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.mx.....0-portatil-_JM

I only trust known brands like Sandisk, Sony and maybe Adata
All other brands are no go for me

The only electronics i trust from dollarama is the SD-card reader and the 3$ (the longer) HDMI cable.

Be glad it didn't have a virus on it.

Is that still a thing? About 10 years ago I bought a Sandisk stick with an early version of U3 Launchpad. It auto-installed and it was a REAL pain to get rid of it.

That's also when I found out that autorun still worked on USB storage even if you disabled it for discs. Surprise!

Sadly it still is - especially in the cheap usb storage world -_-

I ran a virus check on it before opening, you can be sure, and then reformated to be sure that was done properly also.

You were smart. Other people I know take things at face value -_-

Pretty much all the USB sticks on Ebay are also scams. Most of them have firmware that fakes their size, claiming "500GB" when it's actually a 4GB stick. It will work, until you try to write beyond 4GB, and then it will crater your data.

That was likely what was happening to me. (That's year-old news by the way, so I long ago bought a larger, legit USB stick.

If it weren't for necros, there'd be no point in keeping posts live.

Those flapper blappers from Shenzhen sure know how to scam people, stupid pooberflap blap flappers