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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 quicker 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.
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[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).
> 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.
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?
