Punter bags 500GB SSD, finds 128MB Flash inside
Solid Scam Drive
Pity the poor guy who bought a very cheap external hard drive in China, only to find that there was nothing inside but a seemingly cleverly configured 128MB USB Flash key.
The sad Russian's story, relayed by Hardmac, is a salutary tale about paying the right price for things.
But there's an interesting tech story here too. It seems the guy only realised the drive was screwy when he played a video with it – only the end of the movie was played.
Cock-up: the ersatz SSD
Closer inspection revealed the drive was automatically erasing itself when full, and then continuing with the process of writing the rest of whichever file was being copied to the drive. Anyone ever heard of this "feature" in firmware before?
Of course, why the fellow's computer didn't report the true size of the drive is anyone's guess. Perhaps it did, and he didn't check. Maybe the firmware reported a false size to the OS too.
Wonder why he didn't notice how little the drive weighed? The scammers smartly inserted a couple of large steel nuts into the packaging to up the unit's weight. ®
COMMENTS
Read the small print.
Somewhere on there it'll say: "Warning: Contains nuts."
a title is rather pointless
"Market traders are all scumbags, and I can say that with all due respect, as no respect is due"
You've clearly had a bad time, it pays to check that you are buying from a reputable market trader before making a purchase. Personally I've bought loads things from Ebay and Amazon market places and have had little or no trouble with them
500GB usb SSD, really .. a USB SSD
And he was only ever planning on using it connecting to a USB interface??
Surely the lack of a disk drive type interface would be a little concerning?
I know that if I buy an SSD Drive, I look for little things, you know, like a SATA interface perhaps.
Not just China...
I'm a teacher in Beirut, and I've seen this over and over with regular flash drives. Students come in with no-name brand USB flash drives, try to copy a file larger than a few hundred megs, and when they try to access it, it's corrupted.
The drive always reports having the full size available, so there's no way of telling that it's a ripoff until you actually try read the data. I've come to recommend that my students buy name-brand USB flash drives from known retailers.
My Quick Fix
Personally, when shopping for items that can be faked in whatever way (USB storage, perfumes etc.) on eBay, I find the most effective way of eliminating 95%+ of fakes is:
Location
[X] UK Only
[ ] Worldwide
