NYC

Digging through our drawers here at Engadget there is one thing we're clearly not in desperate need of: USB flash drives. We also happen to have a plethora of microSD cards in 1GB an 2GB sizes, left over from the days when picking a smartphone meant Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. This concept USB drive, dubbed The Collector, could potentially solve our conundrum by allowing us to toss all thosethumb drives and find a use for our now homeless microSD chips. The Collector wouldn't have any storage of its own, instead you'd slip up to three microSD cards into it and, when full, simply swap them out for more. It would also combine your smaller chunks of storage into a single block, so those three 2GB scraps would become a slightly less useless 6GB drive. Of course, keeping that pile of microSD cards (now bound by common data) organized might actually be a bigger headache than rifling through your drawers looking for that OFWGKTA mixtape you downloaded so many months ago. Yan...

Welcome to today's episode of "You Get What You Pay For," starring some poor sap in Russia who bought an external hard drive in China for a "very, very low price." It seemed like a bargain, until the schmo noticed that video files were picking up from the tail end, as if the preceding footage had vanished. When the folks at a local repair shop tore the disk apart they found a dinky 128MB thumb drive running in a loop, emptying itself when full only to start saving more data. Laugh all you want, but the repair guys (and us, frankly) are still scratching their heads as to how those scam artists pulled off this mod in the first place.  Hardmac