If you still think “MLC is required for reliability,” you’re using a 2015 rulebook in a 2026 storage world.

If you’ve been around flash storage long enough, you probably remember when choosing NAND felt like a moral decision. SLC was “the good stuff,” MLC was the responsible compromise, and TLC was the thing you avoided unless cost mattered more than sleep. For a long time, that thinking made sense.

But here’s the reality in 2026: the MLC vs TLC debate is mostly historical. Not because MLC disappeared overnight, and not because endurance stopped mattering—but because the way flash storage is engineered today has fundamentally changed what matters.

This article isn’t here to pretend MLC and TLC are identical. They aren’t. Instead, the goal is to explain why the “requirement” to choose MLC over TLC no longer applies the way it once did, and why TLC is now the accepted, proven norm in mass storage environments—including some of the most demanding systems on the planet.

In a world where everything can be edited, one courier carries the last device that refuses to change.

The Shop Vac USB Drive That Shows Up and Gets the Job Done

Let’s be honest: nobody gets excited about another plain black rectangle with a USB connector. But a miniature shop vac that happens to store your files? That gets picked up. That gets shown around. That earns a spot on the desk instead of vanishing into the junk drawer of forgotten swag. This design doesn’t whisper for attention—it rolls in like a little yellow machine with a job to do.

Understanding the Difference Between File Verification and Device Verification

If you’ve worked with USB duplication long enough, you’ve probably heard conflicting advice about MD5, SHA, disk signatures, and “bit-for-bit” verification. Some of it sounds overly academic. Some of it sounds like marketing. And some of it is simply wrong.

The problem usually isn’t that the tools are confusing. It’s that the goal is rarely clarified up front. One person wants confidence a video file copied correctly. Another needs a bootable USB that behaves the same across hundreds of machines. Someone else cares about audits, traceability, or repeatable production.

This article focuses on what matters in practice: what changes between USB drives, when verification is meaningful, and why the method of verification often matters more than the algorithm.

File-Level Verification

For most people, verification simply means wanting confidence that files arrived intact. If you’re sending a video to a client, distributing software to customers, or archiving project data, the concern is straightforward: did anything change during the copy?

Does Nutrafol Work?

This article is not written to criticize Nutrafol as a company, nor to tell anyone what they should or should not buy. It is written from the perspective of a consumer who used Nutrafol Men alongside the Nutrafol Men DHT Inhibitor consistently for over one year, at a combined cost of roughly $120 per month, and did not experience any measurable or meaningful improvement in hair density, regrowth, or reduced thinning.

When a product requires long-term use and a significant financial commitment, it is reasonable to ask what the active mechanism actually is — and whether the expected outcome aligns with how the product works biologically. That question matters in any industry, whether the product is software, hardware, or a health-related supplement.

At GetUSB.info, our approach is not new. Our work has always focused on explaining how technology actually functions beneath the surface — whether that is USB flash drive controllers, NAND memory behavior, data verification, or professional duplication systems. We routinely separate marketing claims from measurable behavior and documented mechanisms. Applying that same standard of evaluation to an off-topic consumer product may seem unusual, but the underlying principle is identical: if the active mechanism is unclear or indirect, expectations should be adjusted accordingly.

A practical look at battery life, power delivery, and why USB charging changes the equation.

AA and AAA batteries quietly power a surprising amount of modern life. From TV remotes and flashlights to wireless keyboards, toys, and test equipment, these small cells sit behind countless everyday tasks. For decades, disposable alkaline batteries were the default choice. You bought a pack, used them until they died, then tossed them in a drawer or the trash and bought more.

That habit made sense when rechargeables were inconvenient, slow, and unreliable. But that era is over. Today’s rechargeable AA and AAA batteries — especially those that charge directly over USB — have fundamentally changed how practical reusable power can be.

To understand why, it helps to break the discussion into two parts: the difference between AA and AAA sizes, and the difference between disposable and rechargeable chemistry.

AA and AAA batteries share the same basic voltage class, but they are not equal. AA batteries are physically larger, which means they can store more energy. A typical AA disposable battery can hold roughly two to three times the capacity of a AAA battery. In real terms, this means an AA battery usually lasts much longer than a AAA battery in the same type of device.

Voltage, however, tells only part of the story. Disposable alkaline batteries start at about 1.5 volts, but their voltage steadily drops as they discharge. Rechargeable NiMH batteries are rated at about 1.2 volts, which sounds worse on paper but behaves very differently in practice. Rechargeables tend to deliver steadier voltage for most of their discharge cycle, while alkalines slowly fade.

This difference matters because many modern devices care more about voltage stability than peak voltage. A rechargeable battery may appear “weaker” by the numbers, but in moderate- to high-drain devices, it often delivers more usable energy before the device shuts down.

\

Portable AI hardware is starting to look practical for small and mid-size businesses — but only if you understand what problem you’re trying to solve first.

If you run a small or medium-sized business and you’ve been paying attention to AI over the past year, you’ve probably noticed something new creeping into the conversation: portable AI accelerators that plug in over USB. They look like flash drives or dongles, but instead of storing data, they run AI workloads locally.

When One USB Drive Shows Up as Two: What’s Really Going On

CompactFlash is The “Original Gangster” of Portable Storage That Quietly Built the Foundation for Today’s Removable Media

Pull up a stool, grab whatever’s in the glass, and let’s talk about a piece of technology that doesn’t get nearly enough respect. Everyone thinks the USB flash drive is the hero of portable storage. That tiny plastic stick that lives on your keychain. The one you’ve lost twelve times. But the real origin story? That goes further back. Before USB was cool. Before laptops were thin. Before cameras shot video. The real OG of modern portable storage was CompactFlash.

CompactFlash showed up in 1994, which doesn’t sound that old until you remember what the tech world looked like in 1994. Dial-up modems. Beige towers. Laptops that felt like gym equipment. Storage was floppy disks, Zip drives, and spinning rust hard drives. Flash memory existed, but it was exotic. Expensive. Mostly for embedded systems and industrial gear. Then SanDisk rolled out CompactFlash and quietly changed the entire trajectory of removable storage.

The performance drop most people blame on “bad cards” is usually normal behavior.

If you’ve ever had a microSD card that felt fast when it was new but frustratingly slow a year later, you’re not imagining things. This is a real, measurable behavior in flash storage, and it happens even with reputable brands. The important part is this: most of the time the card isn’t “broken.” It’s just working harder internally than it used to. In fact, real-world reporting shows reliability issues across removable flash are becoming more common, with USB flash key failures increasing by over 300% in recent years.

The slowdown usually comes from the way flash memory manages itself over time, not from sudden damage. And once you understand what’s happening inside the card, you start to see why some use cases age gracefully while others fall off a performance cliff.

A simple mental model helps.

Think of your microSD card as a warehouse

Picture your microSD card as a warehouse full of boxes. Each box represents a piece of data. The shelves are the flash memory. The warehouse manager is the controller inside the card. The manager has one annoying rule they must follow: once a box is placed on a shelf, it cannot be edited. If something changes, a new box must be placed somewhere else and the old box is marked as obsolete.

That rule isn’t a metaphor. That’s how NAND flash actually works. Flash cannot overwrite data in place. Every change becomes a new write somewhere else.

Early on, the warehouse is empty. There’s space everywhere. New boxes get placed quickly. The manager barely has to think. Performance feels fast and effortless.

Over time, more shelves fill up. Old boxes pile up. Some shelves contain a mix of useful boxes and obsolete ones. Now the manager has more work to do. They must constantly decide which shelves can be cleaned, which boxes must be moved, and where new boxes can go. That housekeeping work happens in the background, but it competes directly with your read and write requests. That’s where performance starts to slide.

At first glance, this USB port looks normal. But a closer look reveals compacted dust, fibers, and residue sitting directly on the contact surface. This kind of contamination doesn’t usually cause immediate failure. Instead, it creates unstable electrical contact that leads to intermittent disconnects, unreliable charging, slower transfer speeds, and unexplained device behavior. Ports don’t need to look “packed with dirt” to cause problems — a thin layer of debris is often enough.

USB Hygiene: How Dirty Ports Cause Disconnects, Data Errors, and Premature Wear

USB is one of those everyday technologies that “just works” right up until it doesn’t. A flash drive disconnects mid-copy. A phone charges only if the cable sits at a certain angle. A USB 3.0 device suddenly behaves like USB 2.0. In many cases, the root cause isn’t a bad device at all — it’s contamination in the port, on the cable plug, or on the flash drive connector.

This article covers the practical side of USB hygiene: what dirt and residue actually do, where contamination comes from, how often ports should be inspected, and how to clean safely without damaging the connector. If you work in high-volume environments (like USB duplication stations), we’ll also cover why hygiene becomes part of the workflow instead of a troubleshooting step.

What a Dirty USB Port Really Causes

USB connectors rely on tiny contact surfaces and tight tolerances. When dust, lint, oils, oxidation, or residue get in the way, you don’t always see a total failure. You get unstable behavior: a device disconnects and reconnects, a transfer slows down, charging becomes inconsistent, or a USB 3.0 device negotiates down to USB 2.0 speeds.

The data risk is simple. Unstable connections cause retries and errors during transfers. Over time, that increases the chances of incomplete writes and file system damage — especially on removable media like FAT32 or exFAT flash drives. This is why dirty ports often get misdiagnosed as “bad drives” or “flaky cables” when the real issue is the connector.

How USB Ports, Plugs, and Cable Ends Get Dirty

A practical, printable checklist to help you decide whether running your own password manager makes sense for your habits—not your optimism.

Password managers have moved from “nice to have” to “you really should be using one.” Most of us carry dozens (or hundreds) of logins across work, banking, shopping, utilities, and personal accounts. The problem isn’t that people don’t care about security. The problem is that humans are terrible at managing unique, strong passwords at scale. We reuse passwords. We choose passwords that feel memorable. We fall for a convincing phishing page once in a while. A password manager is one of the few tools that actually bends the odds in your favor: it generates strong passwords, stores them safely, and fills them reliably so you don’t have to rely on memory.

The current frustration is that many password managers keep their most useful features behind a paywall. Even good, respected options do it. Bitwarden is often held up as the king of open-source password managers, and it deserves the praise: the core product is excellent and the company pricing is fair. But “fair” isn’t the same as “free.” A common example is integrated authenticator features (Time-based One-Time Passwords, or TOTP) being part of a paid tier. That leads to a very tempting idea: if the software is open-source, can you run the whole thing yourself and get the best of both worlds?

That’s where the self-hosting trend comes in. The promise is simple: instead of syncing your encrypted password vault to a company’s infrastructure, you run your own private server and your devices sync to that. You keep the familiar apps and browser extensions, but the “cloud” is your hardware. Some people do this on a small always-on computer like a Raspberry Pi, often using Docker to run the password server cleanly and repeatably. The appeal is real: fewer third-party dependencies, more control, and sometimes fewer ongoing fees.

The part that gets glossed over is what you are actually trading. Hosted password managers don’t charge you only for a feature checkbox. They charge you for operations: uptime, updates, backups, monitoring, redundancy, and a safety net when things break. Self-hosting is not primarily a money-saving hack. It’s a decision to become your own tiny IT department for one of the most important systems in your life. That can be a great fit for the right person and a quiet disaster for everyone else.

If you’ve been around GetUSB long enough, you already know the bigger theme here: control and custody. We’ve written about security hardware, authentication ideas, and the “lock down” mindset for years. For example, our older posts touch on security and control concepts in different forms—like locking strategies (Crack Down on Your Lock Down) and authentication tokens (Network Multi-User Security via USB Token). A password manager is different technology, but the same question keeps showing up: do you want to outsource critical trust to a provider, or keep it under your roof?

What “Self-Hosting” a Password Manager Actually Means

A modern password manager is really two things: the client apps (browser extension, mobile app, desktop app) and the backend service that stores and syncs your encrypted vault. In a hosted model, the provider runs the backend for you. In a self-hosted model, you run it. Your client apps still do the heavy lifting: they encrypt the vault locally and decrypt it locally. The server mainly stores encrypted blobs and coordinates syncing across devices.