I never do it because I don't really see the point of paying money for something that will immediately go into a landfill, but it's always tempting.
Description:
This item is upgraded by 32 GB Pen Flash Drive to 2TB
32GB-2TB, the actual capacity is 32G, the computer displays 2TB, the detection is also 2TB, more than 32G things can be stored, but not displayed.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/234810575961
That's certainly an interesting way to phrase it. I use /dev/null for a similar purpose with the added benefit that it can store petabytes of data, but sadly we don't have the technology to display it yet.
no, that's not honest, farthest thing from it, that's what makes it an actual scam. by having that in the fine print, you can't return it, and they won't be flagged.
Surely they write this to cover their ass when people don't read the entire listing.
"Honest"?
I used to buy 2GB drivers all the time. The only reason I stopped is because it's hard to find anybody selling them.
It's plenty of space for a portable drive, it's enough for a Linux installation, it has lots and lots of uses.
But I wouldn't buy a 2GB driver that pretends to be larger. At least not willingly.
There's even SLC USB drives being advertised, an otherwise extremely overpriced item these days, with sellers posting the exact part numbers and pictures of the insides as evidence. Those may be using recycled flash.
The SSD wasn't great, it was pretty slow, but it did work, and I have used it in conjunction with a USB SATA adapter as something where I can write lots and lots of tiny files for projects I work on [1], and where I don't particularly care if I break it. Surprisingly, it's still holding up...pretty good for free!
[1] One project I've done involves breaking up video files into a picture of every frame, then do some kind of image processing, write the new files, and then glue them back together, which means there can be a ton of writes on there that I don't want to be done on the expensive and irreplaceable internal SSD on my Mac.
It's only fraud if the description mentions new and original. :)
Fun stuff to watch on a boring afternoon.
TLC flash is currently less than $0.10/GB. $3 will probably get you a 32GB drive with flash of dubious quality.
Select the 1-star reviews. Usually someone helpfully posts proof of the scam.
It's not a 100% foolproof way to determine if a vendor or product is fake, but it is helpful. There are some other things you can do to double check things as well. [2]
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-spot-fake-reviews-amazon/
[1] This was a couple years ago, maybe things got streamlined? Of my cards that don't have a foreign transaction fee, Aliexpress wants the phone number off the back of one, which is sketchy; no thanks. The second one, charges don't go through, and the issuer customer service can't even see the attempts; I have to ask them to disable security on my card for ~ 30 minutes, and then the charges go through. Billing showed from England, IIRC. Doesn't (edit: Didn't! thanks) support any intermediates I do (paypal/amazon pay) which is usually my goto for low trust transactions.
I entered my card number with them years ago and it just works.
What I hate is their login and search - both horribly broken.
But as to why, it's a better selection than Amazon for many things (for example components) and usually cheaper.
Sometimes it's trivial to prove, like CMOS opamp with +6V absolute max Vcc supply happily working at +40V.
Double take
What was going on with that one?
After re-formatting it and attempting the backup a few more times, I was frustrated, so I searched the internet for related problems and found out about these so-called "chinese scam drives" that announce size to the drivers that is much larger than actual, and just throw away any writes above some memory address.
I quickly found f3 and tested it - and sure enough, it was a chinese scam drive. I reported the seller to the local inspection and they confiscated all the other drives and gave them a huge fine. I feel pretty smug about it.
Does the US have no local trade protection organizations? They are organized in a way that I would expect their states to insist on this.
Buy name-brand storage from reputable sellers.
Of course the fantastically cheap stuff on Alibaba is fake. You don't even have to check.
I imagine all sorts of random commingling type activities have happened in Amazon warehouses over the years, there is so many avenues for convincing fake crap to accidentally get sold in mainstream sales channels.
half of premium kingston models I got from the did not fall under the obvious and amateur scam this tool detects... but were lower quality chips or outright QA failed units. that half always fails around the 3x capacity writes. so infuriating.
I’m glad to see more awareness of this issue and entrants into the space.
He’s continuing to do awesome work and I deeply appreciate him for it.
After I tried to store more and ran into issues, I did some investigation and found out that it was a counterfeit Sandisk.
I emailed a screenshot with proof to the seller. Because of the very good consumer protection laws we have here, I got my money back.
Sometimes a scammer will give money back easily just to avoid a negative review, irrespective of local consumer protections or lack thereof, if they have currently managed to maintain a good rep (via exchanging good reviews with buyers who haven't tested the item yet, or have passed it on as a present and never will test it, from fake reviews, managing to get negative reviews cancelled the harder way, and other trickery).
https://i.imgur.com/4XeaX.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/FZEYA.jpeg
I tried to fill in a warranty claim when I ran into problems. No dice. I always make sure the seller is quasi official now.
Another tool for testing flash drives that was recommended to me was H2testW.
Bad product reviews on the sales site won't work as they can be easily circumvented if not removed.
Bad product reviews on 3rd party web site won't be effective as well.
I think the right tool is a website to show updated buck/TB prices. So we can avoid buying fake devices. The proem is how/who would keep those data up to date. And how to make that site a popular choice for buyers.
I then tested all of them and found out 4 out of 8 of them aren’t faulty, some of them died and disappeared.
So test your hardwares, test your hardwares that’s used to test hardwares. You will never know you can trust them unless proven.
Edit: badblocks, SMART test, memtest86 and memtest86+, prime95, Intel burn test, OCCT, iperf3, etc are equally useful.
It's great that I can spend 10 bucks and get a competent 32Gb drive, but if we could get around $1, we could treat them as semi-disposable as floppies were.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
If you are a Windows user, ValiDrive seems like the much easier choice.
