Bad new PNY USB Flash Drive?!

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Landstander

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Apr 30, 2014
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I bought two sticks of PNY USB flash drives on sale from Best Buy last week. (PNY 32gb USB 3.0 'Turbo Attache 4' P-FD32GTBAT4-GE)

When I tested them using Check Flash, I get an "Error at range [759100000h..75916A000h]: device write error." on one drive and a similar error on the other (didn't write down the range).

Both errors appear to be in the last block of the map shown in Check Flash.

Is it really possible both sticks are bad out of the package?
I first considered returning both for replacements since PNY isn't a bad brand, but the improbability of this has me ready to give up on the company forever.

Open to suggestions.
 
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Landstander

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Thank you, that was it. I had quick formatted as NTFS. h2testw reports: Attention: Testing only 30097 MByte while only total capacity is 30188 MByte. Therefore the test will possibly not find all errors. For best results please format the media before testing. (On NTFS volumes a small amount of the capacity is reserved, therefore this message is normal.)

Check Flash failed to note that and apparently didn't realize the reserved part wasn't bad. Quick format in exFAT for Check Flash and FAT32 for H2test2 and all is good.
 
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Edwin Drood

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Mar 1, 2017
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PNY are Cheap!

I bought a brand new PNY 64GB flash drive via Amazon. I had an error the first time I used it, so I ran it through a tester like H2testW which writes 57 separate 1GB files to the drive. (writing went well with no write errors) In the middle of the drive at file #28 I get an IO error every time I try to read this file. It is not that the contents of the file are corrupt so much as the drive is corrupt and I get an IO error only when I read this file.

The drive cost me $15. I could try to get my money back, but it would cost me in shipping and hassle to do this. I could keep the drive and never ever delete file #28. The rest of the drive seems fine. However I will always question the integrity of this one drive due to the IO error. I will have to make sure I never "Defragment" this drive (thus moving file#28). As long as file #28 is there and never touched , the rest of the drive seems to be OK.

Frankly, knowing that these manufactures put some "intelligence" on the flash drives to self-correct and hide bad memory locations, it means that this drive is probably a really cheap memory chip that barely passed QA and they did not catch the error that I am seeing.
 
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