REPASSAC – 21 hours ago  » 

I always quick reformat to FAT32 – (I have had write errors after hard formats).

You shouldn’t have any errors on a full format, that’s the idea of it, to highlight errors if there are any.

There’s a really really simple program that will write to any device and then verify what was written, it also gives an indication of speed.

It doesn’t delete anything, including the generated test files so these need to be manually deleted afterwards as the device will be full.

If the device already has files/contents on it the program simply fills the rest and verifies that, meaning the section already containing files doesn’t get checked.

Because it writes and reads to the whole device it can take a while, but well worth it, I bought an expensive branded sd card a few years ago, it was a couple of £’s cheaper on ebay 100% good seller, but the sd card was fake and faulty when tested, the packaging was perfect, the well known manufacturer confirmed the card as fake and I got my money back from the seller. Most people wouldn’t have known and assumed the card had packed up a few months or years down the road.

I don’t want to overload the OP with too much pfaffing around, but if I’d bought a new 1GB Transcend then I’d want to test it especially under the circumstances, similiarly if I had errors on a full format then I’d definitely want to test it.

ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/h2testw_1.4.zip

unzip, read the readme, runs standalone, remember to delete the test files after.

REPASSAC – 16 minutes ago  » 

I trashed 2 sticks that way – all sourced from sources such as Amazon. I do know that these devices, unlike normal hard disks, do have a finite life in terms of writes.

It’s really good that you managed to find 2 faulty/fake sticks that way, most people wouldn’t check and give the manufacturer a bad name when it failed later after losing precious data.

the program writes to it once, reads from it once. If that trashes the usb stick then it’s done it’s job, the usb stick was faulty and/or fake and I for one would really want to know that before using the usb stick/device for anything let alone anything important.

when usb sticks first came out there was mention of 10,000 or so read/write operations (I believe it’s upto 100,000 now) and wear levelling to help. I was bemused when mickysoft brought out their idea of ‘readyboost’ as a memory booster for their bloated windows OS’s as flash memory simply isn’t designed for it.

Anything that uses the usb stick as cache/buffer/stream will prematurely wear the usb stick out after a while. This is a separate issue though to fake and faulty flash memory which in practice is worse than useless and can be easily verified and thrown in the bin or returned/refunded.