Observation of modified microSD memory cards soldered to the motherboard also made CBL pay attention to the decline in the quality of portable flash drives.

Konrad Heinicke, CEO of CBL Datenrettung GmbH, expressed his concern, saying:

When we disassembled faulty USB drives last year, we found an alarmingly high number of low-quality memory chips with reduced capacity and manufacturer logos removed.

He noted cases where defective microSD cards were soldered to USB drives controlled externally by the USB drive board rather than the microSD card’s internal controller.

The problem chips identified by CBL are NAND memory chips that likely did not meet quality control standards and may have come from major manufacturers such as SanDisk and Samsung. These substandard chips are released rather than recycled; some still have the manufacturer’s labels smudged or removed.

CBL also noted another concern about the prevalence of QLC (Quad Level Cell) technology in modern flash drives. QLC technology allows you to store more data on a flash memory chip, but it has become common in inexpensive storage devices. CBL claims that the combination of low-quality flash chips and QLC technology exacerbates existing quality problems and warns against overconfidence in the reliability of flash drives.