[HN Gopher] A free tool to quickly detect counterfeit flash (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
A free tool to quickly detect counterfeit flash (2017)
Author : popol12
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-07-23 14:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io)
| popol12 wrote:
| Just received 2 cheapo 64GB micro sd cards from aliexpress, they
| seemed legit, had tons of reviews with OK crystaldisk performance
| screenshots and... they're junk This tool quickly identified that
| they were counterfeit of type "Limbo", with 16GB of capacity
| instead of 64GB. Thanks to Michel Machado for writing this gem.
| tombert wrote:
| A part of me will see stuff like "3TB Flash Drive" on
| AliExpress for $3 and briefly consider buying it. Like, I know
| it's obviously not true, it's obviously a lie, but I also am
| curious about _what_ I would actually get.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Back when it was being done with external hard drives there
| were YouTube channels dedicated to breaking them open and
| experimenting with how they did it.
|
| Fun stuff to watch on a boring afternoon.
| jayrot wrote:
| The potpourri of a youtube channel, Atomic Shrimp, has done a
| couple interesting videos doing just that.
| pogue wrote:
| His channel is where I first heard of this scam.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=UsWx1iO-aeA
| megous wrote:
| For consumer stuff like this, you'll obviously get something
| else. But sometimes you can get recycled components if the
| price obviously is not sane, where recycling is an option.
|
| It's only fraud if the description mentions new and original.
| :)
| tombert wrote:
| My trick to get decently priced computer equipment is to
| buy used stuff from data centers; generally that stuff will
| sell for pennies because their goal is to "get rid of it",
| not "get rid of it for a profit". Desktop network cards and
| switches are almost always available for very little
| (sometimes literally just $1 + shipping).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Look at govdeals.com for stuff from universities, they
| seem to sell a lot of their surplus hardware there.
| tombert wrote:
| Govdeals is sort of addictive. I've only bought stuff on
| there a few times, but it's fun to look around and see
| stuff like "pallet of 400 laptops" selling for $600.
| callalex wrote:
| How do you find such things? In person or online
| somewhere?
| tombert wrote:
| Sibling comment mentioned Govdeals, which is a place I'll
| look sometimes if I can find something near me or they're
| willing to ship.
|
| You can look on Craigslist as well, especially if you
| live in a large metro area (I live in NYC so it's easy to
| find lots of corporate surplus). Companies will often
| need to upgrade all their infra and liquidate their
| equipment. My printer is a giant nearly 20 year old HP
| office thing that I got for $30 + $100 for the Uber back
| home from an office that did a full IT renewal.
| pogue wrote:
| When you say data centers, what do you mean? If I was
| looking on Craigslist or whatever for this, how would I
| be able to tell which seller is a data center?
| axiolite wrote:
| A few sellers on eBay are honest 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 not bad. Most counterfeits I get are just 2GB so
| hardly useful. Still, the counterfeit firmware makes
| compatibility issues more likely, so better to buy one
| without the counterfeiting.
| p51-remorse wrote:
| Is there any reason I would deliberately purchase one of
| these over a standard 32GB drive? Trying to think of if
| there's a case where I would want to trick some hardware
| into thinking it has a 2TB drive when it really doesn't?
| dns_snek wrote:
| > more than 32G things can be stored, but not displayed.
|
| 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.
| betagammaxyz wrote:
| Lol. That's up there with the [1-bit Bloom
| filter](https://www.xkcd.com/2934/)
| KomoD wrote:
| But why would anyone want a fake 2TB though?
|
| Surely they write this to cover their ass when people don't
| read the entire listing.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Makes backups cheap and easy. Also if you _know_ it won't
| restore, you stop worrying about whether it might or not.
| dwighttk wrote:
| _what you are buying is a piece of paper with a picture
| of an XBox360 on it_
| hex4def6 wrote:
| The issue is that if you exceed the (invisible) limit, you
| start overwriting the existing data. That's Bad (TM), since
| there's no indication that it's happening, until you
| attempt to retrieve the data and discover it's corrupted.
| axiolite wrote:
| The subject of this topic, f3, will quickly probe the
| drive, determine the true size, and create a partition on
| it of the actual usable size. Using that partition, you
| will never lose any data. If you try to create a
| partition in the rest of the drive, it will be
| immediately corrupted, no tools will show it as good, you
| won't ever be able to get around to putting data on it to
| lose it.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> will quickly probe the drive_
|
| Some scam SSDs are smaller drives with hacked controller
| firmware that is bright enough to avoid detection with
| quick scans - you have to write beyond the real capacity
| then re-read to confirm corruption.
| axiolite wrote:
| Have you found cases where "f3probe --destructive" didn't
| work for you?
| dspillett wrote:
| Not first hand, though I've used tools of similar intent
| and found the quick heuristics, while usually very good,
| not 100% reliable, and for storage I want to be sure not
| almost certain.
|
| Note that I was warning about quick tests, I'll have to
| try "f3probe --destructive" on something next time I have
| some playtime to see whether I'd consider that quick! Of
| course, it could be much quicker than the full capacity
| write some tools use to find a defective or deceptive
| drive12 but quick _er_ and _quick_ aren 't the same.
|
| If a quick test says the drive is fake then it is, and
| many fakes can be detected these ways, but it takes more
| to convincingly state a drive _isn 't_ fake.
|
| --
|
| [1] Only a little over true capacity should be needed for
| that, in the case where writes to anywhere up to capacity
| will work (which is common as creating a filesystem more
| complex than FAT/exFat often requires activity similar to
| what quick write/read heuristics do).
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Using that partition, you will never lose any data.
|
| ... unless/until the underlying flash fails. Which it
| probably will; there's every reason to expect these
| drives are made with the cheapest, worst flash available.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _A few sellers on eBay are honest_
|
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| You can certainly return an item if the title of the
| listing was inaccurate.
|
| In my experience, eBay won't "flag" dishonest sellers of
| counterfeit storage products, anyhow. I tried to get a
| listing selling counterfeit Samsung micro SD drives taken
| down, but eBay did nothing. I was refunded, but the
| unsuspecting will continue to be duped.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I don't think buyers of these SSDs want to return it. The
| only reason to buy such an SSD is to resell it.
| Effectively they are enabling other scammers.
| dataflow wrote:
| In what world is a title that says 2TB for a 32GB drive
| "honest"? Is your view that a lie becomes honest as long as
| you add some truths after it?
| axiolite wrote:
| It's a fact of life that titles can't always be a fully
| accurate description of the whole subject. Otherwise we
| wouldn't need the part that comes after the title...
| dataflow wrote:
| > It's a fact of life that titles can't always be a fully
| accurate description of the whole subject.
|
| It's also a fact of life that there is a gigantic amount
| of room between "not fully accurate" and "blatant lie"
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > more than 32G things can be stored, but not displayed
|
| "Honest"?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| They're suppliers to other scammers
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 2GB so hardly useful
|
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| > It's plenty of space for a portable drive, it's enough
| for a Linux installation
|
| RHEL9 installer is 10GB.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I did this on Amazon knowing it was a scam and immediately
| returned it just to drive up their numbers and hopefully get
| them shut down faster. I have no idea if that did any good,
| but what disappointed me was Amazon only gave me credit, not
| a full refund.
| megous wrote:
| Yeah, aliexpress returns real money.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| And there's honest stuff on there too, loads of it actually.
| I bought a 128GB SSD from there many years ago for $10. I
| expected nothing but like you say, I was curious about what
| I'd get and something faster than a shitty USB stick with
| decent storage capacity was all I was after. I verified it,
| and it works perfectly and it's 128GB as described, it just
| lacks cache so it bogs down on super large files. But for $10
| I couldn't buy a better USB stick.
| userbinator wrote:
| They may have true capacity but long-term retention is yet
| to be established: https://htwingnut.com/2022/09/11/ssd-as-
| long-term-storage-te...
|
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| A few years ago Micro Center had a coupon for a free 120gb
| SSD, which I guess worked because I ended up going there
| and buying stuff in order to redeem it.
|
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| https://www.trendforce.com/price/flash
|
| TLC flash is currently less than $0.10/GB. $3 will probably
| get you a 32GB drive with flash of dubious quality.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| This tool could save you from corrupting data but once you buy
| these counterfeit cards you're better off trashing them than
| requesting a refund, shipping will cost you more that the drive
| itself.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Chargeback - goods not as described. No need to return them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Supposedly, card processors are meant to suspend accounts
| when they get too many chargebacks. How is that number
| determined? If it's a percentage of total charges, then
| places like Amazon/Ali* will have so many other charges
| these will pretty much round to zero. Also, these vendors
| are "too big to suspend", so chargebacks will do nothing
| like what they are meant to.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| What do you mean they don't do what they're supposed to?
| They get you your money back. That's what they're
| supposed to do.
|
| Dropping the merchant is a bonus.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The chargeback is meant as last resort though when a
| company is not cooperating. The company has already been
| refunding without having to do a chargeback. The
| chargeback is meant to let the processor know that their
| customer isn't holding up their end of the agreement.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You're correct that it's a last resort, but its primary
| role is to, literally, _charge back_ to the original
| merchant. "[letting] the processor know that their
| customer isn't holding up to their end of the agreement"
| is a side benefit. As is eventually dropping the merchant
| when there are too many chargebacks to justify supporting
| them.
|
| > Through a chargeback, your bank can try to get your
| money back from the seller on your behalf it isn't a
| legal right, but your bank is committed to helping you,
| and will treat any claim fairly.
|
| https://www.visa.co.uk/how-you-pay-matters/chargeback-
| purcha...
|
| > When a customer disputes a debit or credit card
| transaction, the card issuer must determine whether to
| provide that cardholder with a refund for the transaction
| amount--also known as a chargeback.
|
| https://b2b.mastercard.com/news-and-insights/blog/what-
| is-a-...
|
| > A chargeback is a rules-based mechanism, with time-
| sensitive workflows, that enables the issuer and the
| acquirer to determine the financial liability of a
| disputed transaction.
|
| https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardco
| m/n...
|
| > A chargeback occurs when, after investigation of the
| dispute, we debit your account for the amount of the
| disputed transaction and credit the Card Member with this
| amount.
|
| https://www.americanexpress.com/au/merchant/chargebacks-
| and-...
|
| Notice none of them talk about it being a feedback
| mechanism. Because it's not. It's a refund mechanism used
| as a last resort.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > It's a refund mechanism used as a last resort.
|
| you've just skipped over then entire part where the
| websites are freely refunding and not denying refund
| claims making the last resort of a chargeback entirely
| unnecessary
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You are commenting in a thread about chargebacks as an
| option. You are the one that claimed chargebacks aren't
| doing what they're meant to do. They are, you just don't
| know what they're meant to do.
|
| Whether or not a website does refunds on their own does
| not change the definition of a chargeback in any way
| shape or form.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes, you're so wrong. I've had merchant accounts before,
| and there is clear wording about the negative impacts of
| chargebacks. I've even done a chargeback as a consumer,
| and they asked me if I had already been in contact with
| the seller before making a claim.
|
| So the blind advice of making a chargeback claim before
| making a refund/RMA type of request with the seller is
| really out of order in the steps to take.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Clearly the definitions from all three major processors,
| both from consumer and merchant documents, don't mean
| anything. Your anecdotes are far more convincing, for
| sure.
|
| > So the blind advice of making a chargeback claim before
| making a refund/RMA type of request with the seller is
| really out of order in the steps to take.
|
| That wasn't even your point in the first comment. It was
| that chargebacks don't do what they say they do. Way to
| move the goalposts when your initial point was clearly
| proven wrong.
| megous wrote:
| You don't need to ship them back. Aliexpress will fully
| refund fakes, if you send something resembling proof. I got
| refunds for even obscure stuff like opamps, transistors,
| etc., with just a quick video of a oscilloscope output.
|
| Sometimes it's trivial to prove, like CMOS opamp with +6V
| absolute max Vcc supply happily working at +40V.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I did not know that. Thanks.
| Filligree wrote:
| > 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?
| megous wrote:
| Almost all cheap opamps on aliexpress are LM358 or
| similar supercheap bipolar design, no matter what's
| marked on the package.
| ableal wrote:
| > had tons of reviews with OK crystaldisk performance
| screenshots
|
| Select the 1-star reviews. Usually someone helpfully posts
| proof of the scam.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Until a new scammer runs a protection racket offering to
| withhold the scam accusation for a price.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've bought a couple things from Aliexpress, and payment
| processing is such a hassle[1], I don't know why you would use
| it to buy things that are easily found from domestic sources?
| Especially SD cards which are widely counterfeited.
|
| [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.
| gambiting wrote:
| They do support PayPal nowadays. Paying on AliExpress is as
| easy as on Amazon, and a lot of things do have a 5 day
| delivery guarantee and it does actually work. I've been using
| it quite a lot personally(I'm in the UK).
| akvadrako wrote:
| That sounds like issues with your bank, not AliExpress.
|
| 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.
| KomoD wrote:
| Wow, they scam for that little of a price difference? 64GB
| costs almost nothing...
| Zancarius wrote:
| Yeah, really... I picked up a 128GiB card from the store on
| something of a whim a while back, and I'm not even sure I
| paid more than about $18USD (with tax) for it. I bet I could
| have gotten it cheaper, but I was impatient.
| pogue wrote:
| A helpful tool I recommend for buying from common outlets
| online is Fakespot [1]. It scans the reviews and looks for
| suspicious/fake reviews & other telltale signs of deceit.
| Mozilla recently acquired it, but you can scan Amazon URLs on
| their website, and they have a very helpful browser addon.
| There was a similar tool I used to double check called
| ReviewMeta, but they seem to be offline.
|
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.fakespot.com/
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-spot-fake-reviews-
| amazon/
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Every single product on Amazon has a fake spot of like D
| these days. They flooded the field.
| zkirill wrote:
| Does anyone have any experience with mass testing flash drives as
| part of an assembly line?
|
| Another tool for testing flash drives that was recommended to me
| was H2testW.
| haswell wrote:
| For anyone looking for tools that do this, it seems like a good
| opportunity to mention Steve Gibson's Validrive tool [0] if
| anyone out there is trying to help family and friends who might
| be scared off by a CLI tool, and I believe it's non-destructive.
|
| I'm glad to see more awareness of this issue and entrants into
| the space.
|
| - https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
| jayrot wrote:
| It warms my heart to see that Steve's website appears frozen in
| time (and works just fine). I bought Spinrite nearly two
| decades ago and it saved my bacon more than once. Also loved to
| listen to him and Leo on Security Now in the very early days of
| podcasts ("netcasts" lol).
| haswell wrote:
| Security Now is still going strong and I listen weekly! And
| Steve recently committed to continuing past 1000 episodes (he
| was previously planning to wind things down).
|
| He's continuing to do awesome work and I deeply appreciate
| him for it.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| Steve is an interesting guy and while his website and
| software development methods are downright ancient, I would
| trust his programs over almost any other vendor. SpinRite has
| saved me also. I'd encourage anyone who isn't familiar with
| him to check out the Security Now podcast. I have been
| listening since 2005.
| neallindsay wrote:
| I was surprised that when he bought 20 cheap "1 or 2 terrabyte"
| thumb drives, _all_ of them were frauds. This was on Amazon
| just this past September.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Really? You were surprised? Something too good to be true
| actually turned out not to be true? From Amazon no less? I'm
| guessing you forgot the /s at the end of your comment
| rob74 wrote:
| Well yeah, if you take a look at the "group photo"
| (https://www.grc.com/validrive/drives.jpg), you can see that
| all of them are either no-name, have "brands" like "Blanbok+"
| and "Dianww", and one of them is even a borderline
| counterfeit SanDisk product (the SD card). I suspect that if
| he had bought a (non-counterfeit) product from brands such as
| Kingston or SanDisk, he would have got the actual advertised
| capacity (although probably not as cheaply).
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I bought a (little too) cheap large SSD off the internet. It was
| surprisingly slow, but it seemed to work fine, so I assumed
| that's the reason for the low price - until I tried to backup my
| other SSD on it. After the first ~50 GiB, all the writes suddenly
| failed and I could only perform reads.
|
| 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.
| dooglius wrote:
| What do you mean by "the local inspection"? The police?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| the SSDPD
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I suppose the US equivalent would be the FTC (assuming they
| can confiscate and fine?).
| more_corn wrote:
| lol you've clearly never interacted with the FTC.
| dooglius wrote:
| Did the seller happen to be based in your country? It seems
| unlikely to me the FTC would do anything about an online
| purchase to begin with, especially not if it was from
| China.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The US has an International Trade Comission that does
| seize counterfeit imports and those that violate
| trademarks without being deceptive clones. They aren't
| going to do much for one unit, but if an importer is
| bringing in container loads, then they may exercise the
| authority.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Did the seller happen to be based in your country?
|
| Yes, they were running some internet re-sell business,
| probably buying cheap stuff off Amazon and re-selling it
| locally for a higher price.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| From the wording, the GP didn't mean a federal
| organization.
|
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Not op, but if someone is advertising X (eg. 10tb o space),
| and the reality is Y (not 10tb of space), you can call
| "trades inspection" (Trzna inspekcija), and they can issue
| fines, etc.
| amelius wrote:
| Any hope of AliExpress policing this at some point?
| k4rli wrote:
| Site that only offers 2 weeks for order complaints after
| receiving? Not a chance, they love money and don't care
| about anything after item has arrived.
| thedanbob wrote:
| Had a similar experience with a friend's "10 TB" SSD. After I
| tested it with f3 and confirmed it was fake, I opened the case
| and found a 64 GB microSD card and an adapter/faker board.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| "10 TB"? Why did you even need to open it??
| thedanbob wrote:
| Well, at first it only showed up as 2 TB, which was at
| least possible though unlikely. But f3 indicated it was
| faking 10, at which point I realized it was presenting
| several additional partitions that were so corrupted the OS
| wasn't even making them available to mount. After that I
| opened it just to see what was inside.
| Nzen wrote:
| I suspect LorenPechtel's terse question implies that a 10
| TB drive would weigh appreciably more with real hardware
| than a microSD card.
| codetrotter wrote:
| SSDs can be pretty lightweight. And also sometimes the
| fake ones have a piece of metal or even a rock glued to
| the inside of the thing to make it feel heavier.
| wtallis wrote:
| Weight doesn't even have to be accounted for. There's
| simply no technological or marketing reason to
| manufacture a 10TB SSD. An odd size like that is already
| a massive red flag.
| sm_1024 wrote:
| They do make 10 TB+ SSDs:
|
| https://www.allhdd.com/kioxia-kcmyxrug15t3-15.36tb-ssd
|
| Infact, Kioxia's enterprise line goes up to 30 TB/drive.
| tw04 wrote:
| You linked a 15.3TB drive which doesn't dispute his
| point. 10TB has never been a manufactured SSD size that
| I'm aware of. In the enterprise we've got approximately
| 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, 7.6TB, 15.3TB, 32TB.
|
| 10 is skipped entirely, unless you can provide an example
| of any reputable manufacturer producing one.
|
| Consumer drives don't follow that exactly, but consumer
| SSDs also don't hit 10TB+.
| wtallis wrote:
| Exactly. I didn't say 10TB was _too big_ , I said it was
| an _odd_ size. There 's no easy way to get close to 10TB
| when using components that are sized by powers of two,
| plus or minus varying amounts of overprovisioning
| depending on market segment, and GB vs GiB differences.
| ~8TB SSDs are common in consumer and enterprise markets.
| 16TB drives that expose 15.36TB usable space are common
| in enterprise, and 12.8TB usable space from ~16TB raw
| flash isn't unheard of. 10TB usable space isn't
| theoretically impossible, but it simply wouldn't make
| sense.
| simoncion wrote:
| > There's no easy way to get close to 10TB when using
| components that are sized by powers of two...
|
| I expect you can get any usable capacity you like by
| reserving some subset of the flash for onboard
| spare/scratch space. I think I remember long ago
| Anandtech doing some benchmarking the changing
| performance of some drives as they adjusted the size of
| this "housekeeping" section of the drive. No clue if it's
| adjustable on every drive, but it sure was on the ones
| they were testing.
| wtallis wrote:
| Most drives don't have any special functionality for
| adjusting overprovisioning. You just don't touch a large
| chunk of the LBA space and you get more or less the same
| effect. Leaving part of the drive unpartitioned, or
| creating a partition but not putting a filesystem in it
| will accomplish that purpose.
|
| Drive vendors can tweak this in firmware to make the
| drive appear to have lower accessible capacity (or
| higher, for fraudulent drives). But as I've said several
| times, doing so to make a 10TB product _would not make
| sense_. The drives that expose a 12.8TB usable capacity
| from 16TB of flash already have far more overprovisioning
| than almost anybody needs. Further reducing that to 10TB
| would be throwing away capacity for little or no
| performance gain and a useless improvement to write
| endurance. It 's not a product any rational, non-
| fraudulent vendor would create, because there's no demand
| for such a strange configuration. The fact that it's
| theoretically possible to create such a product does not
| actually make a 10TB SSD less suspicious.
|
| (Side note: you don't have to tell me about what
| Anandtech tested with SSDs. Been there, done that.)
| userbinator wrote:
| _There 's no easy way to get close to 10TB when using
| components that are sized by powers of two_
|
| 5 x 2TB? 16Tbit (2TB) NAND flash is available these days.
|
| This old Intel SSD is 10 x 16GB:
| https://www.storagereview.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2010/04/int...
|
| SSDs aren't sized in powers of 2 anymore. Even the flash
| itself isn't due to things like spare area (and TLC flash
| is internally actually a multiple of 3 times a power of 2
| size.)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No, I'm saying that flash devices are pretty close to
| powers of two because that's how the chips come. I would
| presume any solid state device purporting to be 10TB
| would be fake unless I had clear evidence otherwise.
| efilife wrote:
| This website traps me on mobile, can't use the back button.
| Fennec on android
| axiolite wrote:
| Works perfectly fine for me. v125.3.0 with uBlock.
| calebio wrote:
| I can't be the only one who read the title and thought this was
| about detecting a counterfeit Flash player.
| wheybags wrote:
| It was actually silverlight in an adobe branded trenchcoat
| calebio wrote:
| Silverlight, now that's a name I haven't heard in a while.
| Next you're going to say Macromedia.
| manoweb wrote:
| I misread the title and I thought it was some sort of hardware
| to identify vegan meat
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There's no need for 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.
| John23832 wrote:
| I don't have a link, but I thought I saw that this was
| happening with name brand drives from third party sellers on
| Amazon as well. And given that Amazon co-mingles product, it's
| a crapshoot.
| radicality wrote:
| Dont even think about buying flash on Amazon. Use a reputable
| store like B&H, Digikey, Mouser.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, this. Or just buy it in person at someplace like
| Target or WalMart (and _not_ at a "dollar" store). Amazon
| cannot be trusted.
| giobox wrote:
| This is generally good advice, but the sophistication over the
| years of some of the fake Sandisk stuff as one example has
| meant at times even seemingly sound storefronts have become
| polluted with fakes.
|
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| reputable does not mean amazon. they hide random sellers on
| some products and lie they are from the oem on the product
| page.
|
| 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.
| geon wrote:
| I don't think anyone is suggesting to intentionally buy scam
| drives.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| IMO there are no trustable SSD and SD card brands. They are all
| bad.
| gsck wrote:
| How so? I've never had any issues with any of the big name
| brands in the past, without any issue.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 2011, I bought a counterfeit Kingston card over Amazon. At the
| time this was not cheap
|
| 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.
| pogue wrote:
| How do you check the sellers validity?
| bagels wrote:
| This tool has a function to "correct" the capacity. I can't
| understand why that would be useful, I would not trust a device
| like this at all for any purpose.
| JeffeFawkes wrote:
| I picked up a handful of "580gb" microSD cards off AliExpress
| recently, with the goal of using them in mp3 players around the
| house. I figured they'd be reject 64gb sdcards, and I was right
| - they averaged 50-58gb of usable storage. Perfect for writing
| once, reading many times, and cheaper than even 16gb legit
| cards. They can be useful, just know they may also die at any
| moment.
| KolenCh wrote:
| I got a few new USB drives at work for testing data centre
| hardwares. I normally would run f3 on new flash drives but this
| time the deadline is so rushed so I skipped that. Then I wasted
| an hour diagnosing a mysterious problem, and eventually I found
| out the usb drive is faulty after testing it using f3.
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Has someone made a flash drive tester as a standalone hand-held
| device? That would be useful for buyers and incoming inspection.
| Haven't found one yet.
| anitil wrote:
| That's not a bad idea! It wouldn't be too hard to set this up
| with a raspberry pi as a prototype
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Once got a cheap "Sandisk" SD card from an Australian ebay
| seller, which had much less capacity than what was displayed when
| it was plugged in.
|
| 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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).
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| I believe this was so long ago that reviews themselves
| weren't very widespread (or at least not for individual
| products. The seller had good ratings).
| ogurechny wrote:
| Many comments assume (quite naively) that Big Marketplaces have
| no idea that it happens, and are fooled by shrewd counterfeit
| sellers who are always one step ahead. I suppose it is a complete
| fantasy, and those marketplaces have precise analytics on how big
| is the market of selling crap to illiterate consumers. If they
| voluntary abstain from that, and ban swiftly, they'd simply let
| competitors feast on that crowd, which would be bad for
| business(tm). Therefore, the handling of negative reviews,
| refunds, and fraud detection will always leave just enough margin
| for cheap counterfeits to be sold. As long as they both profit,
| it's a _controlled_ dumpster fire.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| Steve Gibson of GRC (SpinRite, Security Now podcast, etc) made a
| free Windows tool specifically for this called ValiDrive:
|
| https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
|
| If you are a Windows user, ValiDrive seems like the much easier
| choice.
| notorandit wrote:
| The tool brings a huge problem. You need to buy one to know it is
| fake, thus making the counterfeiter efforts successful.
|
| 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.
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