Back at the beginning of last year, EDN published my dissection of a yellow-color ADATA UV128 16 GByte USB flash drive that for unknown reasons had died on me:
At the time, I also showed you its blue-tint 8 GByte sibling:
which, again at the time, I noted was still working. Well, it’s still working…at least with Windows-based computers, that is. With MacOS, on the other hand, although it still shows up in System Information when inserted in a USB Type A system connector (either directly or via a USB-C translation adapter intermediary):
it doesn’t “mount” in either Finder or Disk Utility, no matter how I have it formatted (FAT32 or exFAT). This has me wishing that I still had the remnants of last year’s yellow 16 GByte ADATA drive in hand, too, because I now wonder if the same O/S fickleness had applied to it!
Nevertheless, I thought I’d take this one apart, too, to see if there’s any obvious reason why it’s (O/S-selectively) no longer working. I’ll as usual begin with some overview shots, accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes (the UV128 has dimensions of 2.3” x 0.8 x 0.4”/60 x 20 x 9mm and a weight of 0.4oz/10g):
Regarding the prior images’ sometimes-visible USB connector, note that while ADATA’s website is quick to trumpet the product’s USB 3.x interface capabilities:
USB 3.2 High-Speed Transmission Interface
Now there is no reason to shy away from the higher cost of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface. The UV128 USB flash drive brings the convenience and speed of premium USB drives to budget-minded consumers.
Only read performance (“Up to 100 MB/s”) is specified. Initially, post-teardown, I was planning on just writing the following:
“Suffice it to say that, at least from my anecdotal (i.e., non-analytical) experience, although the interface transfer rate may have been 5 Gbps peak, the media transfer rate seemingly wasn’t, at least for writes.”
However, I then remembered that I had a copy of Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on my Windows system (for which, remember, the USB flash drive was—at least pre-teardown—still recognized). On a hunch, I plugged the bare PCB into the computer…the USB flash drive still worked!
Here are the benchmark results:
Like I said, the media transfer rate isn’t 5 Gbps (or even close to it), especially for writes and even for reads.
Then there’s this:
Starting from January 1, 2019, the warranty period for the UV128 is changed to 5 years; For UV128s purchased before (inclusive) December 31, 2018, the warranty period remains unchanged.
What exactly was the warranty period prior to January 1, 2019? Who knows. I’d bought three of these devices from Newegg in mid-July 2016 promo-priced at $3 each (the 16 GByte siblings were purchased from the same retailer 11 months later via a $5.33-per promotion).
Onward. Let’s get the two halves of the case apart:
As was the case last time, the internal assembly then popped right out of the remaining case top half:
A bit more blue plastic left to remove:
The now-revealed pad- and passive-dominant PCB topside (with orientation relative to where the slider “button” is located on the flash drive’s case):
is unsurprisingly reminiscent of the one seen earlier in its 16 GByte sibling:
As for the bottom side of this 8 GByte drive:
in comparison to the earlier 16 GByte counterpart:
I’m once again unable to identify the manufacturer and product details of the flash memory used in the design, which has the following markings:
60074882
5301486066
However, I can ID the media controller, which is different than the one we saw last time. The 16 GByte USB flash drive had used Silicon Motion’s SM3267. This time, conversely, it’s the IS917 from Innostor Technology. My Google research on the IS917 reveals one possible root cause for its incompatibility with MacOS, within an Amazon review titled “WARNING be very careful on non-Windows devices” which details multiple examples of unrecoverable media errors resulting from reformat attempts on both MacOS and Linux. Unfortunately, the flash memory storage device associated with this review no longer exists on Amazon, so I can’t tell if it was the UV128 (or another ADATA product, for that matter) or something from a different manufacturer.
Since USB Mass Storage specifications are standardized nowadays, I struggle to understand how there could be such significant variances from one operating system’s implementation of those specifications to another’s. On the other hand, given that this USB flash drive, and therefore the controller inside it, dates from around a decade ago (here’s an IS917 spec sheet with a 2013 copyright, for example), perhaps there’s a never-fixed firmware or silicon bug in the IS917 that non-Windows operating systems expose (there’s no firmware update available for download on ADATA’s support site), in spite of the product’s claimed longstanding, extensive O/S support?
Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11, Mac OS X 10.6 or later, Linux kernel 2.6 or later, with no device driver needed
Reader ideas are welcomed in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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