[nothercastle]

Ordered 2 flash drives both are probably counterfeit the first 1-2gb of write are at spec and then the speed drops to 1/3 of spec.

Anything you order from Amazon has to be tested for counterfeit. If you can’t verify it’s not counterfeit then assume it is. Even if Amazon is listed as the seller they are clearly swapping in someone else’s fakes. Mine has a secondary retail barcode label on them.

I’m going to send them back with a note in a text file saying they are fake. See if Amazon resells them.

[jerf]

"Ordered 2 flash drives both are probably counterfeit the first 1-2gb of write are at spec and then the speed drops to 1/3 of spec."

If you're writing to them constantly, that doesn't prove they are counterfeit. They will thermally throttle. Naturally, specs don't talk so much about that part. I have an older one that throttles down to almost nothing, but it is still technically writing correctly. I don't use it much anymore, because it's like 16GB which is nothing now, but I used to "liquid cool" it... by holding it with my fingers while writing. I suppose you could call it blood cooling for some metal cred. It wouldn't recover full speed, my blood cooling rig didn't have enough heat transfer (it's got some pretty serious rate limits on how much heat it can handle), but it would noticeably speed back up.

Now, if you can't write the entire space and read it all back with the data being retained, you've got counterfeit.

[throwaway48476]

This has nothing to do with heat. Almost all SSD's have an SLC mode where part of the drive is operated in fast SLC mode. After the SLC cache is filled it will write to the slower TLC/QLC area. Any SSD benchmark will show this. SMR hard drives also do this.

[jerf]

SSDs I know about, but is that true of every USB flash drive? Or any?

And it definitely sometimes has to do with heat, or I couldn't speed my drive up on-the-fly by cooling it.

[throwaway48476]

Only the controller throttles from heat, not the NAND. Sometimes they're co packaged in USB drives.

[nothercastle]

That’s probably what happens. That’s why they go from 120mb/sec down to a sad 20

[mh-]

> note in a text file

I don't think I've ever thought to look at the contents of a new drive before just formatting it, portable or otherwise.

Now I wonder if I've ever missed a note someone left for me..

[throwaway48476]

SLC write cache.