How Many USB Flash Drive PCBs Could You Make From the Monumental Nugget of 1869?

If you crack open a USB flash drive hoping to find treasure, you’ll be disappointed—but not entirely wrong. There is gold in there. Not much, not enough to make you rich, and certainly not worth firing up a smelter in your garage. But a typical USB PCB does contain tiny amounts of gold in its connector plating and, in some cases, inside microscopic bond wires. How tiny? Most USB boards carry somewhere around 1–5 milligrams of gold—less than what sticks to your fingers after eating a Dorito.

Manufacturers use gold because it’s solder-friendly, corrosion-resistant, and makes a perfect electrical contact. Even the thinnest “gold flash” layer on connector pins can survive years of plugging and unplugging. But for recycling? Forget it. You’d need thousands of dead USB drives just to make a visible speck of gold, and tens of thousands to produce anything resembling a nugget. Still, this tiny bit of gold creates a fun thought experiment: what if we went all the way in the opposite direction? What if we took one of the largest gold nuggets ever found and asked how many USB sticks we could make from it?

That brings us to the legendary Monumental Nugget of 1869, the crown jewel of the California Gold Rush’s late years.

Understanding why a truly universal bootable USB flash drive cannot exist, even though millions of people keep searching for one.

People search for a universal bootable USB flash drive because the idea sounds so simple: one USB stick you plug into any computer, and everything just starts. Windows, Mac, Linux, old laptops, new desktops — one drive to boot them all. If millions of people keep looking for it, surely it must exist, right?

But the truth is more like walking into a hardware store and asking for one key that unlocks every house on Earth. Not because the idea is silly, but because every house is built differently. Some have old metal locks, some have smart deadbolts with keypads, some slide, some latch, some spin, and some are designed never to open unless the owner approves it. The problem isn’t the key. The problem is the doors.

A universal bootable USB flash drives drive runs into the exact same issue.

People imagine a USB stick as a magic power switch — plug it into any machine and the computer should wake up and run from it. But computers don’t share a single design. They’re more like different types of vehicles. A Ford pickup, a Tesla, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and a jet ski all have engines, but you can’t fire them up with the same ignition key. You wouldn’t expect the same engine to fit in all of them either.

A tiny design decision in 1996 didn’t just annoy us — it reshaped tech culture, product adoption, and billions of daily interactions.

This post was drafted on a napkin somewhere between a refill and a revelation.

Let me paint you a picture. It’s 1996. Somewhere in a conference room filled with beige computers and men wearing pleated khakis, a group of engineers is finalizing the design for a new kind of cable called USB.

And then… it happens.

Someone says, “Should we make it work both ways?” Someone else replies, “Nah, people will figure it out.”

That’s it. That was the moment. That was the butterfly wing flap that doomed humanity to decades of flipping a plug three times before it fits.

Fast-forward to today. Seven billion people have lived through the USB Shuffle:

1. Try to plug it in. Doesn’t fit.
2. Flip it. Still doesn’t fit.
3. Flip it back. Suddenly works, because the universe is mocking you.

If you haven’t cursed under your breath during step two, congratulations — you’re either lying or, I don’t know, you use wireless everything and hate productivity.

The Cost of the USB Struggle: Humanity’s Dumbest Time Sink

Let’s talk impact. Because this isn’t just inconvenience. This is a global time suck of biblical proportions.

Quick napkin math:

• Average person plugs in a USB 2× a day
• Each attempt wastes 3–5 seconds of flipping, inspecting, and questioning your life choices
• Multiply by 3+ billion USB users worldwide

We’re looking at millions of hours of collective human existence lost to a tiny, avoidable design flaw.

Think about that. We could’ve cured something. We could’ve written more books. We could’ve finally understood taxes. But no — we were busy rotating a rectangle like chimps trying to solve a puzzle box.

If USB Had Been Reversible From Day One

USB “Local Disk” in 2025: the XP-era hack had its moment—here’s the cleaner way (plus a product we found)

If you landed here from our old tutorial about making a USB stick look like a hard drive, you’re reading a time capsule. That guide leaned on an XP-friendly INF/registry trick (tweaking the removable bit with a modified driver). It was clever back then. On modern Windows 10/11, it’s unreliable, brittle with updates, and a magnet for driver-signing hassles. Even when you shoehorn it in, many apps and corporate policies now check the device class the hardware presents—not the label you forced with a file edit.

What changed under the hood

• Windows storage stacks matured (UASP, policy and security hardening), and driver signing isn’t casual anymore.
• Backup, imaging, and install tools increasingly verify “fixed disk” at the hardware level. A spoofed driver doesn’t pass that sniff test.
• Enterprise environments often block or restrict “removable” media regardless of what the OS UI says.

What actually works now

You start with hardware that natively enumerates as a fixed disk. No patched drivers, no post-install gymnastics. The device tells Windows, “I’m a hard drive,” and everything—from Disk Management to BitLocker to fussy installers—behaves accordingly. The brilliant bit about this method is the configuration follows the device. No more editing every PC the USB is connected to.

A product that does exactly that

We found a solution from Nexcopy called USB HDD Fixed Disk . It’s a USB flash device configured at the controller/firmware level to appear as a Fixed Disk / Local Disk on any computer. No utilities to run, no INF edits, no per-PC setup—just plug in and it registers as a hard drive.

How To: Fix the issue of Windows sticking the same USB Flash Drive name to any USB connected

Ever plug in a flash drive and watch an old name crawl back from the grave? You format it, rename it, swear at it… and Windows still insists the drive is called something from a previous flash drive connection like TEST or better yet something like CentOS 7 Boot. The stick isn’t haunted. Windows is just clinging to a stale label it cached ages ago.

A Construction Worker USB Flash Drive That Builds Lasting Impressions

At first glance, this isn’t just another thumb drive—it’s a miniature construction worker, complete with hard hat, safety vest, and a friendly smile. The figure looks like something you’d keep on your desk, and that’s exactly the point. It mixes a useful tool with a playful, display-worthy shape, so people actually keep it rather than toss it in a drawer.

Update [June 13, 2025]: The official press release is now live. Click here to read the full announcement.

Since 2008 when USB flash drives really started getting mainstream most IT folks and systems integrators leaned on USB drives with physical write protect switches to safeguard files from tampering or corruption. But that hardware toggle — while once helpful — is on its way out.

Industry insiders say a major USB technology company based in Southern California is preparing to unveil a new type of flash drive that renders the old switch obsolete. According to early chatter, the device uses firmware at the controller level to lock the drive into a read-only state by default — no manual switch, no end-user slipups, and no chance of getting flipped off accidentally.

More intriguing? Sources say the device is password-controlled, re-locks automatically when unplugged, and supports scripting for mass deployment — making it a potential game-changer for government agencies, hospitals, and manufacturing workflows where USB data security isn’t optional.

From what we’ve heard, this isn’t just an upgrade — it’s a reimagining of what write protection on a USB drive should look like in 2025. Keep an eye out for the official announcement, expected within a week or so.

It’s not just the end of the physical USB write protect switch — this marks a new standard for secure flash storage.

Editor’s note: We’ll update this post with a link once the official announcement is live.

The USB Mass Storage Device Protocol defines how USB devices which are attached to a host computer should interact (such as flash drives, external hard drives, and memory cards) and this protocol is critical for allowing stuff to talk with each other in the computer world. Here’s a breakdown of its core components:

In order for a USB flash drives to work interchangeably with other devices a universal standard must be created, defined and implemented for both device manufactures (the flash drives) and the host manufacturers (what flash drives are plugged into). The “Mass Storage Device” is the more technical term for what a USB flash drive is ( or USB hard drive or other memory storage device ) classified as. The classification spells out how communication works between the host computer and USB device.

The following information is a general outline and meant for non-technical readers to better understand the USB Mass Storage Device is. A link at the bottom will direct readers to a more technical resource, say someone reading up from a computer science class.

Let us start with the “Device Class and Protocol”

As mentioned the Mass Storage Class (also known as MSC) is a set of specifications which define a standardized way the USB device will present itself and communicate with the host (what it is plugged into); for example a computer, smartphone a car stereo or even the USB socket you find on a passenger plane. All of these “hosts” must conform to a specific way to communicate with the device.

Although we mention the USB socket of a plane, that particular situation doesn’t require “data transfer” and it’s only meant for power; although a specification is still required even when only dealing with power and/or charging. With that said, the most common protocol used for MSC devices is the “Bulk Only Transport” or BOT. The BOT is a method defining how data is either read or written from one device to the other. The BOT is designed to be fast and optimize data transfer while at the same time providing a reliable and stable code base for transferring data.

As a side note, the BOT was improved with UASP. The newer UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) was introduced for the USB 3.0+ speed of devices. The UASP improves the older BOT by allowing faster data transfer rates and better performance to the devices which support the newer UASP.

So whether the host and attached device, say a USB flash drive, use BOT or UASP the commands used come from the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) protocol. This protocol was developed in the late 1970s and ultimately introduced to the public for use in 1986. So the SCSI protocol has been around for a very long time.

One pillar of the SCSI protocol is the “block device” appearance of a device connected to a computer. This block device approach helps organize data and allows the two to communicate in blocks. Remember the most basic, 1024? the block device approach allows data transfer to work more efficiently and organized than other approaches.

The Mass Storage Device specification will classify data transfer speeds. This type of classification will setup the host computer and device on the best method to communicate. This is important because you want to define a Mass Storage Device’s ability to transmit data, during either the read or write operation, to an optimal speed for best performance. So for example, you don’t want a USB 3.0 hard drive communicating with the host computer at USB 2.0 speeds. The classification for data transfer will sync up the proper protocol.

It’s mind blowing to think that storing a terabyte of data used to cost about 100 billion dollars. Nowadays it fits on a $20 flash drive (MSRP is closer to $100)

In 1956, IBM introduced the first hard drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, which had a storage capacity of about 5 megabytes (MB). The cost of this system was approximately $10,000 per megabyte, meaning the entire system would cost around $50,000 for just 5 MB of storage.

To calculate the cost of 1 terabyte (TB) of memory in 1956 using this rate:

• 1 TB = 1,024 GB
• 1 GB = 1,024 MB
• 1 TB = 1,024 x 1,024 MB = 1,048,576 MB

At $10,000 per MB, the cost of 1 TB would have been:

1,048,576 MB * $10,000/MB = **$10,485,760,000** (over 10 billion dollars)

So, 1 TB of storage would have cost over 10 billion dollars in 1956.

By 2020, the cost of storage had decreased dramatically due to significant technological advancements in the storage industry.

In 2020, the cost of storage was approximately $0.02 per gigabyte, which translates to $0.00002 per megabyte. Using the same calculation as before:

• 1 TB = 1,024 GB
• 1 GB = 1,024 MB
• 1 TB = 1,048,576 MB

At $0.00002 per MB, the cost of 1 TB in 2020 would have been:

1,048,576 MB * $0.00002/MB = **$20.97**

So, 1 TB of storage would have cost around $21 in 2020.

Although the Covid pandemic is officially over, from that time, people are paying more attention to the cleanliness of things they come in contact with. Because this website is dedicated to USB technology, it’s probably worth a mention about the Microban Technology used with USB flash drives from Verbatim.

Microban technology is a type of antimicrobial technology that is incorporated into products during the manufacturing process to provide continuous antimicrobial protection against a range of microbes such as bacteria, mold, and mildew.

Microban works by disrupting the vital life processes and biological functions of microbes that come into contact with the treated surface. This disruption helps to prevent the growth and proliferation of these microbes.

Verbatim is now incorporating some of their USB flash drive products with this Microban technology. Consider the following:

If someone handles a flash drive with unwashed or unclean hands, they can transfer bacteria or other microbes onto the surface of the drive. Common bacteria from hands could include Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli (E. coli).

Flash drives are often carried in pockets, bags, or purses where they can pick up dirt, dust, and other contaminants that may contain microbes. Pockets and bags are not always the cleanest environments, especially if food, tissues, or other items are stored alongside the flash drive.

The Verbatim flash drives are available from Amazon in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities. The “Pinstrip” drive uses the Microban technology.

Microban technology was developed by a team led by Dr. John H. McConnell in the mid-1960s. Dr. McConnell, along with his colleagues at Microban Products Company (formerly known as Microban International), pioneered the use of antimicrobial additives for various applications, including consumer products, textiles, and industrial materials.

Using the “Imagine with Meta AI tool, we have not found the correct prompts to generate a realistic looking USB flash drive. This is the best we’ve come up with. If someone is having success creating an AI version of a USB flash drive, please let us know! (gmo [at] getusb [dot] info)

Encrypting a USB flash drive is quick and easy in Windows 10. The PRO version of Windows 10 will allow anyone to activate Microsoft’s built in bitlocker technology to encrypt an entire flash drive, or part of a USB flash drive.

Microsoft BitLocker is a disk encryption technology designed to enhance data security by encrypting entire disk volumes on Windows operating systems. Introduced with Windows Vista and included in subsequent versions, BitLocker provides a robust defense against unauthorized access and data breaches.

The primary purpose of BitLocker is to protect sensitive data in case a device is lost, stolen, or accessed by an unauthorized user. It uses full-disk encryption to secure the entire contents of a disk, including the operating system, system files, and user data. Even if someone physically removes the hard drive and attempts to access it on another system, the data remains inaccessible without the proper authentication credentials.

BitLocker employs various encryption methods, with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) being a commonly used algorithm.

The encryption process is transparent to the user once configured, and access is granted through authentication methods like PINs and passwords.

Below are nine screen shots and simply follow along in your Windows 10 Pro computer and do what you see below. The process is very easy to do. The longest part of this entire setup is the encryption of the USB stick itself. The time required to encrypt the drive will depend on a couple of factors, such as the GB capacity of the USB drive and the processing power of your computer. In the example below, using a USB 2.0 device with a 16GB capacity the encryption time took only 4 minutes.