Re: Detecting the life of a USB flash drive?
Paul <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt |
|---|---|
| Organization | A noiseless patient Spider |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tue, 1/6/2026 10:22 PM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote: > On 6/1/2026 7:30 am, Paul wrote: >> On Mon, 1/5/2026 10:05 AM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote: >> >>> Say I placed a brand new USB drive at home. Someone sneaked into my home and replaced it with an old one. Can I detect this? :) >>> >> >> Drive serial number ? >> >> wmic diskdrive get serialnumber >> >> Probably easiest to check a hard drive label, >> to see if the printout matches any field >> on the drive label. > > > That only tells the serial number, but not the date it's manufactured. Old and new are just dates. ;) > You wanted to detect a "substitution" of the item. Record the original serial number, then if the serial number is changed, you know the device has been replaced. That is all the serial number can do. USB sticks are of such poor quality, that the manufacturer doesn't want you to know how much usage it has had. On one stick, I only got to write it with a DVD ISO about seven times, before it died. The flash should manage at least six hundred writes. Whereas the older flash drives, ones having SLC or MLC flash, those last and last. I have one that is 8GB capacity, and it's had lots of stuff stored on it. Paul