SSDs are dropping in price pretty quickly even in a tough economic climate, but some deals seem too good to be true. Another incident confirms this. On the website of the American store Walmart a suspiciously profitable offer was discovered: an external SSD with a capacity of 30 TB for only $39. At the same time, they mimic external SSDs from Samsung by design.
The affair was exposed by a blogger Ray Redacted – he did not regret $ 31.40 and purchased a similar dubious device on AliExpress. Its packaging says 30 TB, and also that it is M.2, which is strange. By the way, on the pages of the largest Chinese marketplace like proposals a lot, and not only 30 TB, but even 60 TB. Sometimes even with positive feedback.
Inside the “solid state drive” bought by the blogger turned out to be a card reader with USB 2.0 port and two microSD cards with an actual capacity of 512 MB. Due to the firmware of this board, each card, when connected to a computer, declares its capacity as “15.0 TB”, that is, supposedly 30 TB in total.
Image source: twitter.com/RayRedacted
By the way, exactly 15.0 TB shown by the drive is an additional reason to think. The fact is that Windows refers to disk space in gibibytes (1024 megabytes) and tebibytes (1024 gigabytes), while storage manufacturers use gigabytes (1000 megabytes) and terabytes (1000 gigabytes). Therefore, a drive with an “honest” 1 TB is usually displayed with a capacity of about 930 GB, and not a beautiful round number.
Image source: twitter.com/RayRedacted
When trying to write large amounts of data, this disk conscientiously preserves the original directory structure, but files are written cyclically: new data over old ones. That is, during copying, everything seems to be going fine, but the problem is revealed only when you try to read what was written – there are no files in place. Finally, another “degree of protection” from a meticulous user was the artificial slowdown of the bus speed from 5 to 0.48 Gb / s.
In the comments, the blogger who disassembled the scheme was suggested alternative ways to deceive gullible citizens, but these differences are more of a “cosmetic” nature: for example, instead of two memory cards in the case of an “external SSD”, an inexpensive flash drive can be hidden – an ordinary small USB drive, of course, too with “alternative” firmware that can mislead an inexperienced user.
Note that for the most part, fake SSDs copy the appearance of real Samsung T5 SSDs. The latter are offered in versions of 250 and 500 GB, 1 and 2 TB. Samsung offers the last two versions in the US for $140 and $250, respectively.
Also note that fake SSDs have been on the market for a very long time. Now, however, this scheme of deception has reached a new level. Firstly, a lot of such “solid-state drives” began to be offered, and secondly, and this is even more important, now such solutions have reached American stores, while previously they were found mainly in China.
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