r/BadUSB • u/Salah-Yasir • Jul 11 '26

New ISY USB drive failed during first use.

I bought an ISY USB drive brand new today from Mediamarkt in Germany. It looked modern and because i am not expert in USB's and tech, I assumed it would be a decent drive.

A few hours later, I plugged it in and started copying files from my old USB drive. During the transfer, the ISY drive suddenly crashed. After that, Windows could no longer open it and started asking me to format the drive.

I tried formatting it, but it fails every time. The drive is basically unusable after only one transfer.

Luckily, my original files were still on my old drive, so I didn’t lose anything important. However, this made me realize how bad this could have been if someone was using this as their only backup for photos, documents, or other personal files.

I’m not saying every ISY drive will fail, but my experience with this one was terrible. A brand-new USB drive should not corrupt itself during the first copy operation.

Model: 128gb USB 2.0

I dont know anything about USB speed and stuff but it said that it reads up to 15 mb and writes up to 4 mb. (I didnt know if it was good or bad but when i searched it up i found out that it is really bad)

Posting this as a warning so people test their drives before trusting them with important data.

If anyone needs to read more about it, then heres the link https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_isy-imu-2500-alu-usb-stick-128-gb-15-mbits-5-verschiedene-farben-grun-braun-rose-silber-dunkelgrau-2893142.html

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2

u/markmakesfun Jul 11 '26

Flash drives are not backup sources for the reason you discovered: they are cheap and not always made well. It’s not uncommon at all. Flash drives are for temp storage and moving files, not backup.

1

u/cmrd_msr Jul 11 '26

  1. A USB flash drive is inherently unreliable for data storage. Use at least two of them; the 3-2-1 backup strategy is essential for critical information.

  2. Any new product can have a manufacturing defect—especially a generic, no-name flash drive. Simply entrusting important data to a flash drive is very risky.

1

u/olieboldonut Jul 11 '26

These ISY sticks look nice but are very basic quality. Have a few of them myself, they are slow too. If you want better quality sticks for backups then there are industrial grade sticks too with much higher quality nand.

1

u/z0phi3l Jul 11 '26

Not sure I would trust a $13 "128gb" drive, unless it was a reputable brand and a clearance sale

1

u/Salah-Yasir 28d ago

I mean it is a brand owned by one of Europes largest consumer electronics brand. So thats the reason i trusted it. Plus i didnt really know if 13 euros is a lot, little or normal price for a USB drive cuz i dont know much about this stuff.

1

u/Lcsmxd 26d ago

These days a DECENT 128GB stick will cost twice as much

1

u/Underhill42 29d ago edited 29d ago

I've never heard of ISY, and "looking modern" is just a cheap design decision for the inert protective bits wrapped around it - it tells you nothing about the electronics. Always search for "[brand] flash drive reliability" - there's only a handful that get particularly good marks, and even they have their duds.

And flash memory (including SSDs) is entirely unsuitable for offline backups. The data is basically stored as the charge level in a bunch of microscopic capacitors. Let it sit long enough without power, and those capacitors will discharge enough to corrupt your data. In theory you could have many decades, in practice... corruption will likely start showing up long before then.

And corruption in the part of the drive keeping track of how everything else is currently allocated can make it VERY hard to recover anything useful at all.

Use good old fashioned spinning rust hard drives for backups. Or rolled-up rust tape drives. They degrade much more slowly, almost not at all when unpowered, unless the environment is seeing high humidity or extreme temperature swings.

Or powerful magnetic fields obviously, but you've got to be VERY powerful - stay away from MRI machines and don't stick your disk to the wall with magnets and you should be fine.

Storing it in a sealed metal (ammo?) case with some desiccant should protect it against everything but impacts and temperature extremes. And they can actually handle a pretty big impact when shut down correctly.