As I browsed the net for high-capacity thumb drives, I came upon a curious site called Wish.com . There I found a USB 2.0 thumb drive for sale in two capacities: 512MB and 1TB. The 1TB drive is the one that really stood out to me as it had a very surprising price: $20.
I highly doubted that the drive was legitimate, especially since there were no reviews. Considering the cost of current 1 TB thumb drives are several hundred dollars, the saying of “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is” comes to mind.
The problem with some drives, is they may seem legitimate when used. The write process may very well show the full amount, however the drive has a background program that actually re-writes over the original. This trick the operating system into thinking there is 1 TB of storage, and by all accounts moving 1 TB of data (which I can’t imagine the time that would take on USB 2.0) will seemingly work. However, when you actually look into it you will see that there may only be 8, 16, 32, or if you are lucky 64 GBs of data there.
This style was also used in knock off SSDs – a SSD shell would be used to make it look legitimate, but upon opening the case you would find a 2GB thumb drive and some bolts for weight.
Still, I couldn’t help but be curious – how large was the actual drive? I purchased the drive and patiently waited for its arrival.
The packaging was nothing special, basically a bubble wrap envelope with the drive by itself in plastic. I can’t say we were off to a good start.
Still, I wasted no time plugging it into a test computer and ran it through anti-virus scans. At the very least, the drive came back clean. Next, I set about testing it.
The first program I used is ChipGenius, which scans the flash chips itself to find actual size and manufacturer. The reveal was more in line to my expectations. The software read the drive as using SanDisk flash memory at 32 GB in size. Still, I couldn’t have two discrepancies.
The next test was a program called FakeFlashTest. This test didn’t even get to finish as the program would lock up at about 75% through. Definitely not good sign.
So finally I decided to do a real world test by transferring 90+ GBs of pictures and music onto the drive and see what, if any, data is missing or corrupted.
As expected, over half of the files and folders could not be opened. Folders and files that used nearly 28GB did open fine, further pointing to the drive as being 32GB in size.
Ultimately the drive met my expectations of being a fake. Again, if it is too good to be true, then it probably is.
I do recommend avoiding sites like wish.com and eBay to buy any thumb drives (or any other flash memory for that matter) and go straight to legitimate retailers such as newegg.com, amazon.com, or even retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. As you can already buy affordable thumb drives, it doesn’t make much sense to save a few dollars and risk getting a fake.
Questions or thoughts, please be sure to post your comments below!
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