What a Fake 2TB Flash Drive Looks Like
The REAL Deal about Products
Welcome to our product review section. If something sounds too good to be true....
Recently we've seen quite a bit of hype around some cool tech gadgets and have been curious to find out if these things are actually legit or just more fake news. In some cases they have been cool and we have enjoyed using them, in others they were completely fake, hoaxes and we asked for our money back. Check out the reviews below for some insights so you don't get scammed.
* Note: We are in process of expanding this section, but to start it off, here are two reviews that we think you'll find very insightful... The Y1028 Slimming Massager and 2TB Flash Drives: Fact or Fiction? (below)
Reviewed: 2 TERABYTE Flash Drives
TL;DR: All of the cheap ones are currently fake, don't buy them. Skip to the bottom for the good news.
A friend was recently raving about this new 2TB flash drive he picked up on Wish for under $15 and was so excited. He plugged it into his laptop and checked the drive size immediately after opening the package and it was recognized as a valid 2TB drive. A small, compact flash drive with 2 Terabytes of storage? If that is real, we hads to have the preciousss.
We logged into our wish account and found lots of these listed. Wow! Also checked out geek and amazon with the same results. So we ordered one and waited. While tracking the package, we also started looking at other review sites to see if people were testing these things and in fact yes there were some. We looked at how others were testing them and queued up some of our own nerdiness so we had tests ready to go when the preciousss arrived.
What we discovered:
- There are some tools available to test flash drive storage capacity
- Some of these tools are old and can take days to test a high capacity drive
- Be careful when downloading drive testing utilities. Scan the download for viruses please and don't download from sketchy looking sites.
- Key Finding: Flash Drives can be manipulated to falsely report their storage capacity
- There are a variety of algorythms that allow a drive to selectively overwrite itself so it appears to keep storing more and more data
- These techniques often corrupt previously written data rendering the drive useless past it's default capacity
- Currently fake TB drives often have quite a small true capacity 2-4GB which is why they can be sold so cheaply
- It was fairly easy to get our money back when we reported our findings
The drive that we tested was reporting itself in Windows 10 > Drive Properties as having a 2TB capacity. However, after running a variety of file read/write/corruption tests, we discovered that after 2GB mark, the drive began looping back and corrupting data that had already been written to the drive. Clever, but a complete fraud. Sadly the preciousss was not so precious... our 2TB drive was actually only 2GB. Once again proving the adage, If it sounds too good to be true... it probably is.
The GOOD news is that REAL 2TB drives do in fact exist!!! They are just not cheap, yet.
What a REAL 2TB Flash Drive Looks like
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