You can modify the firmware of these flash drives quite easily with the many thousands of leaked tools.
OEMs like Patriot, PNY, and other companies don't make the flash drives they sell. They just order a massive amount of vanilla flash drives and plastic cases and put em together... Well not exactly. That's an easy way to think about it, but the reality is more complicated and involves different manufacturing processes per each OEM.
Most mass manufacturing machines run windows xp, its the best balance of cost of prodction of the machines and software. They run simple tools for modifying and customizing the flash drives they produce. The tools luckily also run on standard desktop computers. A bunch have been leaked to the public, and there are websites dedicated to archiving these tools.
Be ready to use a translator on the websites if you don't speak Chinese or Russian.
There are a lot of tools to choose from. You might need to identify your flash drive automatically with the identification tools available on those sites. Your best bet is to open your flash drive and read off the component ID on the main IC (usually smaller of the two black chips), and the flash component ID (the larger rectungular IC, sometimes there are more than 1 flash chip).
Note that SSDs are very similar.
Now with the correctly matched tool, to the exact model of the microcontroller on the flash drive, and if you want to mess with the NAND you'll also need some other file that has to do with the physical layout of the NAND, you can change the firmware of the flash drive.
- Things like it's displayed name upon plugging into a computer.
- USB VID and PID
- serial number
- Maximum reported, and actual power draw
- LED behavior (always on, blink speed, blink only on data read/write, always off)
- Capacity reported
- Executing NAND badblock scans
- Adding virtual cdrom based on an iso image
- Adding firmware encrypted password protection
- Adding second, third, and fourth LUNs ("physical" disks reported to OS)
- Permanent read-only partitions
- Type of device reported to the OS (SCSI, SATA, flash drive, CDROM, others...)
- Percentages of capacity to reserve for wear-leveling
- Read/Write speed cap/uncap (uncapping can massively speed up some drives, but sometimes is unstable... think overclocking your flash drive...)
- Removing that pesky "read-only flag" that makes OEMs so much money when people think they must replace their flash drive...
- Many many other things that understanding chinese would be of great use to figure out...
It would be technically illegal for me to provide those tools (I think?) so I'll leave it to the reader to find them. They're not hard to find.