I bought a cheap Chinese usb stick for use in my car as it's all spangly and bling (tdk and the like don't do ones like this). Yet now I'm worried to use it...

Would it / could it cause any damage? And would I be covered by a warranty if it did?

There's an article this morning in the good old scaremongering daily mail about faulty Russian usb sticks

I bought it off amazon, not down the pub btw

Good quality USB sticks, such as Sandisk etc are such good value now I wouldn't risk the cheapo kak

If they did a USB stick which was spangly and bling on both sides I wouldn't have looked elsewhere, price certainly wasn't the reason lol

Paint a quality one with spangley nail varnish :)

and stick glitter to it! Genius!

Job's a good 'un

Sorted :)

It is quality over aesthetics for me. That said, I doubt it will do any damage but if you are in two minds, don't use it.

I bought a cheap Chinese usb stick for use in my car as it's all spangly and bling (tdk and the like don't do ones like this). Yet now I'm worried to use it...

Would it / could it cause any damage? And would I be covered by a warranty if it did?

There's an article this morning in the good old scaremongering daily mail about faulty Russian usb sticks

I bought it off amazon, not down the pub btw

Hi, the sticks referred to in the article are not faulty, they have been specifically designed to cause damage.

It's claimed these sticks are not commercially available (yet).

Cheap USB sticks are generally very slow at reading and copying data, but for music playback this should not be an issue.

Brand make USB sticks are generally best, and these days fairly cheap to buy.

to be honest, any stick sent with a virus will cause problems on the platform its designed for, for example, windows is the most common one.

Best thing to do is plug it in to your PC, as the security software you use will no doubt scan the disk as soon as its inserted, preventing any problems. Then, if you format the disk, you remove any files that can be used. I would always check the disk space available as well. If its a 2GB disk, I would expect to see at least 1.84GB available space for example, but if it was missing a few hundred meg, I would be concerned there is a reserved flash space which could have an underlying purpose.