They are the scammers. Come on people, dont be so incredibly naïve. Also, CCP has 50% of ALL cameras on the WHOLE planet. JUST TO SPY ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE. I have never seen a flag this red, well maybe Mao, but thats where they are going again. And if you are still not sure, read some about Tiananmen Square or Xinjiang. People of China keep strong.
The thing I hate about these scams isn't that people fall for them, it's the resources wasted to make these scam products. From the metal and plastics used in the casing and electronics to the energy used in manufacturing.
A lot of people fall for these scams. These products are made fake so obviously that anyone with even a little knowledge will know that this is fake and won't buy it. But to these scamsters it's just a way of filtering out the smart people and the left over are the most innocent, unsuspecting victims. That whom they prey on unfortunately. Its the same with all those email scams of Nigerian prince, customs tax etc etc
The dummies that buy them are guilty, that's what happen when you won't understand that there are limits to price lowering. Remember the first rule of market: if there is request there will be offer.
Because counterfeits are their way of draining their opponents. If they can flood every market with counterfeit or low quality products at a markup price, they have effectively cornered and outmaneuvered the other guys market. They have every market segment flooded. Ebay, Amazon, WalMart, and so on. They can flood legitimate markets with bad quality stuff, they can replace easily for a mere fraction of the cost.
@@DanielKarnole-fs3hm I just bough a Kingston and a Sandisk 128 GByte USB stick from Amazon and was honestly surprised to find out they actually work as expected.
Sold by whom, on Amazon? Never buy tech items from third-party sellers. Even if they're trying to be honest, they're not savvy enough to prevent getting scammed themselves in their inventories.
@@joesterling4299 Yes but also no, Third party seller being a scammer is not always the case, you have to take a look at seller feedback reviews, and how long they've been on the site, & lot of them are actually genuine, i've bought lot from 3rd party sellers with no problems at all, if the seller only newly joined then this could be a red flag
It's actually quite common to see the removal of IC markings on components that are purchased from the grey-market, rather than them being removed by the OEM/scammer themself. This is often just to remove date/batch codes so that they can't be easily traced back to a supplier.
I love videos like this, I've seen those drives before and wondered what's inside. No idea why they try to go so ridiculously fake capacities, surely they would con more people saying like 2TB for €40, not 64TB! I would love to see a follow up video on how Ali Express deals with your complaint, what actions they take against the scammers, etc.
The thing is, they don't want normal people to fall for it, or it gets too much attention. Better have a few people fall for it that can not for one reason or another discern the scam within time for a refund, which includes people that simply do not have the time to lookup normal prices, reviews, or verify a drives full capacity, and are a bit naive/dumb
Those scammers in some cases spend more money to make even more money than it's actually worth in the end. No worries... I almost confused myself there on that statement. lol
@@vocassen quite possibly, I'm also surprised Ali Express doesn't have an automatic product description to price checker, this would clean it's site up of things like this and people would have a little more faith in ordering from them.
@@Speak_Out_and_Remove_All_Doubt Why? They profit from this And it won't be reliable anyway, right now at least normal people will delude themselves that they would never fall for a scam, and the allure of cheap products will keep some types of people coming anyway
@@vocassen but that's like saying why do any shops ever sell anything that's real? I would fully expecting the total revenue Ali Express generates to increase significantly in the long run if the world fully trusted Ali Express listings and sellers.
You should be using the fake flash test program, it has a quick test mode that doesn't need to write the whole drive. It writes a small file every 1 MB or so apart, instead of filling up every single sector. It is pretty reliable at quickly testing these kinds of drives, even at slow speeds.
I still dont understand why some people buy these things thinking they are going to get a good deal. You just cant get something for nothing. These scammers steal peoples hard earned money.. Thank You for showing this. Love your videos.
Because people who aren't doing tech stuff on a constant basis will have no idea what a reasonable price is for this sort of thing, especially with the "tech constant gets cheaper" thing - and on the surface, there's no obvious difference between the misleading marketing that tech companies have been doing for decades, and the misleading marketing that these sellers are doing.
'Everybody knows that China makes things for pennies on the dollar and if you just buy direct, cutting out the greedy middle man, you can save hundreds..'
Talking with some Filipino and Thai tech sellers, it's really so bad that a mistake of 64GB vs 64TB is possible. They just don't know anything and don't care about precise specs. There is a absolute no money back gurantee even on fraud cases in this countries.
Great video. I also avoid "retail partner" sales on Amazon, Bestbuy etc. If it doesn't say "sold by Amazon", I'm suspicious. In the case of Bestbuy, I always avoid things designated "marketplace seller." There may be times when you can afford to take a chance, but be prepared to have to deal with a counterfeit. When it comes to usb devices, ssd drives, that sort of thing, I avoid them completely. It's also a good idea to have testing programs, such as the ones you used.
That's it. Amazon should be held liable for anything fake they allow getting sold on their storefront by third parties. But they're not, so they're lax in policing such scams. It may be best just to go directly to the source of what you want--Samsung, e.g. Or a physical reputable store, like Microcenter. (We're regressing back to brick and mortar?)
AliExpress scams always make for great entertaining video. Would love to see more AliExpress scam videos in the future - or other oddities you typically don't see on everyday PC market
The genuine products themselves are actually stolen IP.. Samsung has been stealing 'NETLIST's IP and manufacturing chips illegally. They have also teamed up with google (colluding to bankrupt netlist in order to obtain netlists patent portfolio due to a clause in the JDLA, but theyare trying to 1. Reinterpret the contract, and 2. Telling the judges to redefine law and language) to cause maximum financial, and material damage... so far, samsung is getting off lightly, they are on the hook for 303m, but have stolen billions, and even stopped Netlist supplying their own chips to their own clients, intentionally caused them tax problems and more.. Samsung are top-tier scammers
im not dumb enough to buy dumb things from them but did have good luck with there 11P 11pin USB Data Extension Cord 1 Female to 2 Male Y Splitter Cable after i needed it for controlling my RGB fans with but so far no issues after i had modified it into a 10 pin one which wasn't hard to do after i couldn't get one from Corsair
As someone who has bought sketchy MicroSD cards off Wish before I'm very familiar with H2testw and how LONG it can take. I appreciate your time making this video.
I appreciate the amount of air they give me inside the case. All the "legit" companies try to pad out my air with PCBs and ICs and use things like "solder" to try to stick things together...😔
I wouldn't plug it into anything of mine 😂 even if I had tons of extra PCs. All that stuff costs money and rolling the dice like that just isn't worth it to me I guess. I suppose just for the sake of making a video about what not to do I would plug it into an old/low end rig I didn't care about. Or plug it into like an isolated virtual machine of some kind if I knew how to do that lol.
My thoughts too, who knows what kind of software is hiding on these, especially the one that insists on internet connection, Keylogger, ransom ware... the only good thing is it might take awhile to steal your passwords.... 🤣
Just don't buy SSDs with 0 reviews and that's all. Looks like the moderator here really hates Ali since he's deleting every comment that is remotely positive or neutral towards it...
@@theMaster...I'm not a simp for anyone I just follow things that benefit me, the first reply said something right, if you buy something without any reviews regardless of the shitty website you're buying from, you will likely get played. It's been years for me buying from AliExpress because it's cheaper than Amazon and my country's stores. However, I am cautions whenever I buy from there.
@@theMaster... LMAO, are you American or smthn, bringing politics everywhere. I give credit when it's due, Ali provides good service and fair prices, especially for those outside of 1st world countries.
I have literally never had a problem buying anything off AliExpress but storage, which I got around by buying directly from the Samsung store, which I also have to do on Amazon. Besides the 3 storage products I didn't receive one product I've bought and I got a refund no questions asked. I also get to ask about warehouse conditions if I want, which is why I started shopping there, hair extensions.
The firmware VA001CBN reveals a bunch of similar drives with about 128GB capacity, but the flash chip markings (lol, the random mixed ones on the "pro") are not Intel nor Micron (the main problem is the missing capacity after 29F). But if you unsolder these and put them into a nand programmer, it should read out the ID of the chip - to tell what it actually is inside. Ask around at some data recovery companies if they could ID the chip with their tools electronically.
The flash chip logo looks exactly like IMFT (Intel) ones. I own an Intel 760P SSD and the flash all have that logo on them. Micron logo has an "M" inside the circle. The SSD controller silver colour top looks like a typical one from SMI .
@@fleurdewin7958 yes I noticed that too.. the typical intel double arrow oval. But if they made up the part number.. they could just forge the logo as well.
There are plenty of people out there who are clueless when it comes to this. They won’t know what TB means or what makes the legit products so much more expensive. Imagine an old man who has been a carpenter all his life. To him, a hammer is a hammer and dealing with all the technical stuff is way too complicated.
Not so engineer if he went to buy, import, avoid paying taxes, duties or custom clearance of a restricted product you can simply go and buy at any European shop with proper taxes, warranty and customer protection. Just a xenophobic video genre. What do you expect to find in an international Bazar? Aliexpress is good for cheap original Made in China or compatible (licensed or not) electronics, etc. Or to find very expensive western gimmick at very eastern cheap debunked tech. $5 Magic Brand Eraser sponge or 5 usd set of 10 sponges of melamine foam? Or ceramic magic coating for 100usd for 100 drops or a gallon of hydrophobic silica solution to spray? Or strange cable adaptors, electrònic misvelania, etc.
@@InternetListener Dude he is just buying computer hardware so what restricted products are you talking about?? and the corrupted bureaucrats ain't gonna use the tax money for any good for society so better not to give them any.
@@wvjeepguy8178 too strong of a word in English, maybe. I'm sorry but didn't find any better suited synonim to the ethimological meaning. And didn't want to write a philosophical essay tech media youtube content neither do a Wall of Text. Fear to strange/foreigner things, I meant. Sometimes one gets lost in translation...
Note for the external drives with microSD cards, these days they use a controller that reads some config off the beginning of the card (hence why you were prompted to format, because it's the config and not the MBR at the start) to set the capacity and USB identifiers. If you put in a card without that config, it works like a normal SD card reader. The controller is off the shelf, the only trick is they can be configured by the card. The microSD card tends to be real capacity (when you use it in a regular reader), just low quality.
A really close friend of mine and fellow IT worker got scammed on Newegg for a 2.5" Samsung SSD, after contacting Samsung and sending them pictures of the drive and the PCB they told him it was a fake, and they contacted Newegg to have them refund him.
This happened to me a few years ago. I bought a 2TB external drive, turned out to be 80GB drive. AliExpress returned my money immediately without having to return the drive AND the store disappeared a few days later. :) EDIT: Also, two weeks ago I was trying to buy a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB. I tried ScAmazon, BestBuy Canada, and Staples, all of them wanted around $200 plus $150 for shipping ( ! ! ! ) Yes, I live in a remote area, but checking shipping rates it only costs $12 to mail me the parcel. So, I reluctantly looked to AE for one. Found a 980Pro for $203 CAN$ with free shipping. I made sure that the company had at least 1000 sales and a rating of 95% or higher positive feedback. Got my drive 3 days ago and everything is 100% legit, and registered with Samsung for warranty purposes. :)
These SSD scams were so prevalent in Facebook ads. As quickly as they showed up, they were taken down. It's shameful how much effort these scammers go through to rob people when they could go to making actual contributions instead.
Friend of mine was taken for a ride on "used almost new laptops" for $70 with good specs, and an new electric bike for a stupid price (price of a battery pack), they use average looking white folks standing alongside the boxes "in the warehouse:" so these might well be local scammers - fakecrook doesn't shut down the fake ads either, greedy thieves both of them!
I gotta say, I am impressed with the scammer's modifications to the controller to slow down write rates. That avoids getting an outright write error and gives them a way to extend the scam by creating as much confusion for the user as possible. Since SSDs, and NVME drives in particular, allocate blocks dynamically (literally they use a key,data scheme internally where the 'key' is basically the block number), it is possible to make the SSD appear to be as large as you like. And it will even work up until the point where the flash fills up. Since vendors put varying amounts of extra flash in real drives, the "capacity" is just a programming parameter in the controller, completely independent from the actual amount of physical flash available. The scammers programmed the parameter to be super huge and then it looks like they must have implemented a write-slow-down feature to delay actually filling up the true capacity of the flash, preventing the end-user realizing that the device is a scam. Impressive. -Matt
There is no speed modification. These devices usually contain two basic components: an off-the-shelf USB SD card controller along with the corresponding storage medium, and a dedicated programmable chip that implements the scam (and you can buy these chips in aliexpress). In the most simple scams, this chip is just falsely advertising the type of device and its capacity. In more elaborate scams, the chip is actually manipulating the read and write operations so that the device produces no read/write errors when exceeding its capacity. Basically, the storage is overwritten in round-robin fashion which will produce data loss but no write errors. So, some testing software that uses "small" test files is not able to easily detect the scam. The only very noticeable problem is the slow transfer speed.
There are multiple variants of those fake 980/990 Pros. If you deal with the retail versions of those SSDs long enough, you can immediately spot the fake ones right from the packaging. I believe there are even fake 870 Evo as well (seen the packaging, the text is way off from the real ones).
@@minbcraft What do you reckon? Chinese entities + tampering with tech = some kind of spying? is what my gut says. Inbefore they start replacing DRAM and Cache, with mini cameras & mics. I hope I have my tin foil hat on lol.
I've been into this stuff for quite awhile now and when I started to see these "So Called" good deals pop up I already had a clue to what was going on and refused to waste my time and money on this stuff. Comparing price to size is Very telling and common sense will tell most people that this is nothing but a SCAM! If Aliexpress will allow this to go on then use your common sense and Don't buy this junk!! I think it's called To Good To Be TRUE😉. I thank everyone and YOU for showing how crooked a lot of these sellers are!
My recent Samsung 970 Evo plus 2Tb m.2 ssd using Samsung's in house cloning software by default sets the cloning process as NTFS. Pardon the clunky writing. Still waking up. LOL
The rule is: "If a product in Ali has less than 5 perfect stars, then it is probably a scam." I got scammed in the same way with an ssd in Aliexpress and lost important files. Everytime they sell these products they have 4 stars and half or less. 90% of people buy the scam and don't complain, probably because they just didn't realize. Only a 10% of people or less complain and if lucky get a refund. From now on, I will always check the 1 star reviews, even if it was only one soul complaining.
Thank you SO much for taking the time to test these for us. Most of us SHOULD be aware of such scams BUT its great to see what you have done. Tis amazing they get away with it.
Nice to see OEM surplus boxes being put to 'good' use... The same sort of scams occurred shortly after USB storage drives (pen drives) hit the market... very common in China...
At least the first one isn't pernicious to the point of writing over the old data. You may well find out the scam before it bites you hard. Very cool of you to do this.
Not only does a 980 Evo not exist. As far as I'm aware (I was looking for one a few weeks ago), Samsung doesn't even make 4TB NVME drives. The highest they go is 2TB. Western Digital makes 4TB NVME drives, but not Samsung. The only "4TB EVO" drives Samsung currently makes are 2.5 inch SATA drives.
At least it wasen't an Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU paied promotion xD. ( These processors have massive stability issues and manufacturing contamination causing corrosion and CPU dying ).
if one of these stores would be anywhere around my house....next day it would be in the newspaper burned down due to an electrical fault...marchandise included..
I think for those M.2 drives they took some generic drive and reprogrammed the controller so that the speed would approach 0 as the drive reached its real capacity.
If a real SSD has the controller forced to a size larger than it actually has it will probably just drop speed to zero because it can't find any more empty block. Also with less capacity left the drive drops speed naturally, it's just how SSDs work
The moment i saw the transfer speed of the 64TB drive i got the feeling it was just an enclosure with a small flash card inside. I've never used AliExpress and likely never will, I tend to go to established tech retailers even if it means paying a small premium for peace of mind.
@@vocassen It mostly depends on where you live. Where I'm from Amazon is both more expensive and slower, so I'd more often get things from Ali. I got replacement cushions for my HD6XX, a Wok, Noctua NF-A9 fans, Phantex T30 fans, a torque wrench, IEMs(Tin T2 and Moondrop Starfield), CPUs(Haswell and Skylake), a whole bunch of dev boards and electronic components, and a bunch of other stuff I don't even remember. Never got scammed. Not even once. And whenever something didn't arrive or couldn't be sent either the seller or Ali would issue a refund. I'm not saying it's perfectly safe or as good as Amazon in terms of customer service and protection, but in the utter majority of cases you're going to get what you paid for.
They aren't allowed to sell production ready CPUs that aren't crippled in their market. We have very strict control over what they are allowed to keep and sell.
Yeah, I bought one of those 40Tb USB SSDs, sort of expected it to be bogus, which it was. It came up as being "there" as a connected device, but writing files into it got progressively slower . . . and slower . . . and slower, and finally died in the process. Apparently they have some software trick to make it look like xxTb, but in reality, a few Gb is what's there, and basically unusable. Amazingly, I actually got a refund (from Wish) though it took several weeks. Quite fun watching your video . . . thanks.
The funny thing is that I actually bought a 64GB MicroSDXC card from AliExpress for my Nintendo Switch. Price was around what you'd expect, and the performance was also as advertised (around 10x the speed of the product Roman actually received, lmao). It wasn't a deal that sounded too good to be true though. 😅
Aliexpress is not a scam per se, and you can get plenty of good quality stuff in there, you just have to buy from you reputable brands and stay away from "too good to be true" deals.
It's items like this that completely ruin the reputation of Ali Express. I don't buy anything from their site and I tell my customers to not to buy anything from them either.
That's not my experience (so far). Also, if I were to get something fake from Amazon they would take it back and refund as soon as UPS picks it up and logs it in, not tell me that I can have a refund if I ship it back to China at a cost that's 100 times more than the product is worth.
Only if you buy from 3rd party. If you buy with Prime you will get legitimate products shipped from the manufacturer to Amazon. 3rd party and second-hand / warehouse deals do not count.
@@tralfazy Very hard to tell a good fake. Visually they are almost perfect now, even the packaging. A good fake will also have performance that is atleast barely in the ball park. The problem btw is not that Amazon willingly sells fakes, the problem is that (some) Amazon 3rd party vendors are scammers and sell fakes with shipping with Amazon *and* Amazon will then combine the inventory of all vendors that sell a product and their own inventory, so if you order SD card x with seller Amazon you might actually get the Sd card from seller ScamMaster3000 and the other way around someone that orders from ScamMaster3000 with Amazon Shipping might get the genuine Amazon stock.
@@snakeplissken8887 I have heard of cases where even Amazons supply chain has become contaminated with fakes (from what i know it tends to only be specialist stores that get their products directly from the manufacturer, there are companies which form the link between retail stores/online stores and the manufacturer) It could even be the case that amazon doesn’t keep the stocks of different sellers separate (so you could buy a product and receive a product that was sent to amazons warehouse by a different seller) Even well known physical stores have ended up with fake products on the shelves
I was looking at the 1080pro nvme ssd on ebay. I thought it was too good to be true. I found this video and it confirmed my suspicions. Thank you for the video!
The "M.2" SSD and atleast probably not a micro SD card inside. They are more "legit" scams, but still worthless! :) Great you took this up! There is also scams of micro-SD and USB drives. :(
I'm surprised the first one had anything inside at all. They like to pretend their "enclosure" is an SSD and list the max specs for a device you *could* put inside.
They're add descriptions are almost always very cryptic, Be very careful of the fine print. They are very slow in shipping and in cases like this that is good, gives you time to cancel. Of products I have gotten from them , finally, have been OK and work. But I feel you are very correct in this case and cancelled the one I ordered. Good work sir.
More importantly, never plug any USB device on your computer that is not from a trusted source. There are malwares that can infect your computer by just pluggin it in.
Great timing for me on this video as I was looking at some of the NVME drives on Alibaba, I know they are fake and are using old chips and controllers. With the outright lie of capacity and speed is enough to detour from any purchase. Then with anything is the reliability of this garbage. Should have learned my lesson from the SSD I bought a while back that would pop in and out of Windows and was really slow. Couldn't even use for file transferring as it would just stop reading after a bit. Good Video!
As a very young boy I learned that no matter WHAT it is, unless you're at a garage sale or yard sale (those are big here in the States) most likely if it sounds too good to be true, IT IS.
What's common with these is the drive will accept that much advertised data, But what it's really doing is filling up and then overwriting to go past the real storage capacity.
I have a bunch of "1TB" "blue" 2.5" SSDs that I got from someone out of curiosity. They're all 128GB SSDs (about half have 2 nand chips, about half have 4 nand chips), and the controller is some Realtek thing with the info etched off. There is a Realtek SSD/NAND tool floating around somewhere that will tell you the NAND info, and that's how I figured it out. If there were a way to reprogram this controller to reflect the flash's actual size, at least then the SSDs would be usable in some capacity. But as it stands, you just can't risk using them.
For the external usb drives, one would just have to flash/hack the ssd/SD card controller to show a false number. It's similar to gpu flashing where for example a Nvidia GTS 450 shows up as a RTX 2060.
It is more elaborate than that. The scam chip produces a false advertisement. But it also intercepts the read/write operations so that there are no errors when there is an operation over the real capacity of the device. These devices usually allow you to write any amount of data to the device because they overwrite the storage when the capacity is reached. So, you never get a write error despite the data loss. And this is what makes this scam dangerous: casual users that trust amazon and other major retailers, will write data on these devices and never get a write error. Only later will they find that older data is either corrupted or simply gone.
Thank you, this is what I have always suspected, having had a bad experience with a couple of USB cards, one didn't even work 😮 . Greetings from UK 🇬🇧 😊🇷🇺
Never ever buy anything from that particular Chinese source. I've had a few reasons for tears purchasing from them, I gave them a second chance, then a third, then nonononono to any more.
Your problem is your desktop wallpaper. Power users always set their desktop wallpaper to solid black. You can have any color you want, as long as it's solid black.
I would love to see a follow up video on how Ali Express deals with your complaint, what actions they take against the scammers, etc.
They won't do anything to the scammer, at most they will grant him a return and a refund, but the scammer will still sell on the portal.
@@The_Noticer. We do care. Ali should remove the sellers for good.
I would assume that AliExpress would give the seller a bonus payout.
@@The_Noticer. 這就是騙子
They are the scammers. Come on people, dont be so incredibly naïve.
Also, CCP has 50% of ALL cameras on the WHOLE planet.
JUST TO SPY ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE.
I have never seen a flag this red, well maybe Mao, but thats where they are going again.
And if you are still not sure, read some about Tiananmen Square or Xinjiang.
People of China keep strong.
The thing I hate about these scams isn't that people fall for them, it's the resources wasted to make these scam products. From the metal and plastics used in the casing and electronics to the energy used in manufacturing.
Honestly couldn’t help but notice what a shame it was too - the amount of effort put into making that look like the real deal is sad.
A lot of people fall for these scams. These products are made fake so obviously that anyone with even a little knowledge will know that this is fake and won't buy it. But to these scamsters it's just a way of filtering out the smart people and the left over are the most innocent, unsuspecting victims. That whom they prey on unfortunately. Its the same with all those email scams of Nigerian prince, customs tax etc etc
You're allowed to hate both.
E-waste out of the factory
The dummies that buy them are guilty, that's what happen when you won't understand that there are limits to price lowering. Remember the first rule of market: if there is request there will be offer.
It's kind of funny that they haven't changed the way they do this type of scam for 10+ years...
Because counterfeits are their way of draining their opponents. If they can flood every market with counterfeit or low quality products at a markup price, they have effectively cornered and outmaneuvered the other guys market. They have every market segment flooded. Ebay, Amazon, WalMart, and so on. They can flood legitimate markets with bad quality stuff, they can replace easily for a mere fraction of the cost.
Why change if it keeps working? They keep doing it because people keep falling for it.
For real. I remember fake 64-128GB USB sticks from 2012
@@mjc0961 Yeah, never touch a running system.
@@DanielKarnole-fs3hm I just bough a Kingston and a Sandisk 128 GByte USB stick from Amazon and was honestly surprised to find out they actually work as expected.
P.S. The 10TB+ USB SSD scam is sold everywhere from Amazon to Ebay to Walmart, it's farfrom an AliExpress issue
Sold by whom, on Amazon? Never buy tech items from third-party sellers. Even if they're trying to be honest, they're not savvy enough to prevent getting scammed themselves in their inventories.
Moreover, scammers who somehow operate from. Amazon, all are Chinese, Pakistani or India people.
@@joesterling4299 Yes but also no, Third party seller being a scammer is not always the case, you have to take a look at seller feedback reviews, and how long they've been on the site, & lot of them are actually genuine, i've bought lot from 3rd party sellers with no problems at all, if the seller only newly joined then this could be a red flag
You're a good person, Roman, and that's why any of us watch your content. Never quit.
It's actually quite common to see the removal of IC markings on components that are purchased from the grey-market, rather than them being removed by the OEM/scammer themself. This is often just to remove date/batch codes so that they can't be easily traced back to a supplier.
I love videos like this, I've seen those drives before and wondered what's inside. No idea why they try to go so ridiculously fake capacities, surely they would con more people saying like 2TB for €40, not 64TB!
I would love to see a follow up video on how Ali Express deals with your complaint, what actions they take against the scammers, etc.
The thing is, they don't want normal people to fall for it, or it gets too much attention.
Better have a few people fall for it that can not for one reason or another discern the scam within time for a refund, which includes people that simply do not have the time to lookup normal prices, reviews, or verify a drives full capacity, and are a bit naive/dumb
Those scammers in some cases spend more money to make even more money than it's actually worth in the end. No worries... I almost confused myself there on that statement. lol
@@vocassen quite possibly, I'm also surprised Ali Express doesn't have an automatic product description to price checker, this would clean it's site up of things like this and people would have a little more faith in ordering from them.
@@Speak_Out_and_Remove_All_Doubt Why? They profit from this
And it won't be reliable anyway, right now at least normal people will delude themselves that they would never fall for a scam, and the allure of cheap products will keep some types of people coming anyway
@@vocassen but that's like saying why do any shops ever sell anything that's real? I would fully expecting the total revenue Ali Express generates to increase significantly in the long run if the world fully trusted Ali Express listings and sellers.
You should be using the fake flash test program, it has a quick test mode that doesn't need to write the whole drive. It writes a small file every 1 MB or so apart, instead of filling up every single sector. It is pretty reliable at quickly testing these kinds of drives, even at slow speeds.
connect with computers well glad that is what it connects to🤣🤣🤣
I learned of that software after getting a "deal" on a USB Stick advertised at 256 GB that overwrote every 32 GB.
@@lavenderlilacproductions my experience as well. It will say the drive is good even when it is not 2/3 of the time
I still dont understand why some people buy these things thinking they are going to get a good deal. You just cant get something for nothing. These scammers steal peoples hard earned money.. Thank You for showing this. Love your videos.
Because people who aren't doing tech stuff on a constant basis will have no idea what a reasonable price is for this sort of thing, especially with the "tech constant gets cheaper" thing - and on the surface, there's no obvious difference between the misleading marketing that tech companies have been doing for decades, and the misleading marketing that these sellers are doing.
Not all money is hard earned, many earn easily.😂🤑
'Everybody knows that China makes things for pennies on the dollar and if you just buy direct, cutting out the greedy middle man, you can save hundreds..'
Talking with some Filipino and Thai tech sellers, it's really so bad that a mistake of 64GB vs 64TB is possible. They just don't know anything and don't care about precise specs. There is a absolute no money back gurantee even on fraud cases in this countries.
But then you couldn't make click bait youtube videos :)
Great video. I also avoid "retail partner" sales on Amazon, Bestbuy etc. If it doesn't say "sold by Amazon", I'm suspicious. In the case of Bestbuy, I always avoid things designated "marketplace seller." There may be times when you can afford to take a chance, but be prepared to have to deal with a counterfeit. When it comes to usb devices, ssd drives, that sort of thing, I avoid them completely. It's also a good idea to have testing programs, such as the ones you used.
That's it. Amazon should be held liable for anything fake they allow getting sold on their storefront by third parties. But they're not, so they're lax in policing such scams. It may be best just to go directly to the source of what you want--Samsung, e.g. Or a physical reputable store, like Microcenter. (We're regressing back to brick and mortar?)
AliExpress scams always make for great entertaining video. Would love to see more AliExpress scam videos in the future - or other oddities you typically don't see on everyday PC market
How about we stop giving money to Communists? Its not going to be nearly so funny when youre being sent to an oven by the Commie/Fascists.
The genuine products themselves are actually stolen IP..
Samsung has been stealing 'NETLIST's IP and manufacturing chips illegally. They have also teamed up with google (colluding to bankrupt netlist in order to obtain netlists patent portfolio due to a clause in the JDLA, but theyare trying to 1. Reinterpret the contract, and 2. Telling the judges to redefine law and language) to cause maximum financial, and material damage... so far, samsung is getting off lightly, they are on the hook for 303m, but have stolen billions, and even stopped Netlist supplying their own chips to their own clients, intentionally caused them tax problems and more..
Samsung are top-tier scammers
you'd be spending 1,000 hours a day 1,000,000 days a year watching them. Obviously you don't have a life
At this rate we will need an open source ssd card for avoid this scams.
im not dumb enough to buy dumb things from them but did have good luck with there 11P 11pin USB Data Extension Cord 1 Female to 2 Male Y Splitter Cable after i needed it for controlling my RGB fans with but so far no issues after i had modified it into a 10 pin one which wasn't hard to do after i couldn't get one from Corsair
As someone who has bought sketchy MicroSD cards off Wish before I'm very familiar with H2testw and how LONG it can take. I appreciate your time making this video.
the test would be faster on a real ssd
It's good to spread awareness about it
As a trained eye I instantly recognise these cases, there's dozens of them with different branding
Thanks for the video!..Fake products is also becoming a real problem today
It's nice of them to hot glue the SD card in, that's more care than some OEMs of non scam hardware give.
I appreciate the amount of air they give me inside the case. All the "legit" companies try to pad out my air with PCBs and ICs and use things like "solder" to try to stick things together...😔
You're much more brave than me lol. I wouldn't even plug these into my PC. Who knows what kind of ransonware comes on some of these 😂
the test benches are disposable anyway
He probably only used it in test environments. Guy’s too smart to plug that into his personal PC.
I wouldn't plug it into anything of mine 😂 even if I had tons of extra PCs. All that stuff costs money and rolling the dice like that just isn't worth it to me I guess.
I suppose just for the sake of making a video about what not to do I would plug it into an old/low end rig I didn't care about. Or plug it into like an isolated virtual machine of some kind if I knew how to do that lol.
I expect he is using a test rig or something.
My thoughts too, who knows what kind of software is hiding on these, especially the one that insists on internet connection, Keylogger, ransom ware... the only good thing is it might take awhile to steal your passwords.... 🤣
Thanks der8auer for another great video! I really appreciate all you have taught me here on this channel.
one thing ive learned long time ago, is never buy storage in ali
Just don't buy SSDs with 0 reviews and that's all.
Looks like the moderator here really hates Ali since he's deleting every comment that is remotely positive or neutral towards it...
@@ZysperroDon't be a Simp for Communists. Not a good look...
@@theMaster...I'm not a simp for anyone I just follow things that benefit me, the first reply said something right, if you buy something without any reviews regardless of the shitty website you're buying from, you will likely get played. It's been years for me buying from AliExpress because it's cheaper than Amazon and my country's stores. However, I am cautions whenever I buy from there.
@@theMaster... LMAO, are you American or smthn, bringing politics everywhere.
I give credit when it's due, Ali provides good service and fair prices, especially for those outside of 1st world countries.
I have literally never had a problem buying anything off AliExpress but storage, which I got around by buying directly from the Samsung store, which I also have to do on Amazon. Besides the 3 storage products I didn't receive one product I've bought and I got a refund no questions asked. I also get to ask about warehouse conditions if I want, which is why I started shopping there, hair extensions.
I never thought I'd hear the words "Scammed" and "AliExpress" togehter in the same sentence!
lol j/k That's about all I expect.
Thanks for the video!
The firmware VA001CBN reveals a bunch of similar drives with about 128GB capacity, but the flash chip markings (lol, the random mixed ones on the "pro") are not Intel nor Micron (the main problem is the missing capacity after 29F). But if you unsolder these and put them into a nand programmer, it should read out the ID of the chip - to tell what it actually is inside. Ask around at some data recovery companies if they could ID the chip with their tools electronically.
The flash chip logo looks exactly like IMFT (Intel) ones. I own an Intel 760P SSD and the flash all have that logo on them. Micron logo has an "M" inside the circle. The SSD controller silver colour top looks like a typical one from SMI .
@@fleurdewin7958 yes I noticed that too.. the typical intel double arrow oval. But if they made up the part number.. they could just forge the logo as well.
calling in the nuclear option with supply chain identification lmao
There are plenty of people out there who are clueless when it comes to this. They won’t know what TB means or what makes the legit products so much more expensive.
Imagine an old man who has been a carpenter all his life. To him, a hammer is a hammer and dealing with all the technical stuff is way too complicated.
Ah good, another episode of 'Engineer debunks stuff on Aliexpress'. Please, continue.
Not so engineer if he went to buy, import, avoid paying taxes, duties or custom clearance of a restricted product you can simply go and buy at any European shop with proper taxes, warranty and customer protection. Just a xenophobic video genre. What do you expect to find in an international Bazar? Aliexpress is good for cheap original Made in China or compatible (licensed or not) electronics, etc. Or to find very expensive western gimmick at very eastern cheap debunked tech. $5 Magic Brand Eraser sponge or 5 usd set of 10 sponges of melamine foam? Or ceramic magic coating for 100usd for 100 drops or a gallon of hydrophobic silica solution to spray? Or strange cable adaptors, electrònic misvelania, etc.
Xenophobic? Lol....ok..
and it's not even debunking, he just bought from a scam vendor like a dumb person would do lol literally just read the reviews
@@InternetListener Dude he is just buying computer hardware so what restricted products are you talking about?? and the corrupted bureaucrats ain't gonna use the tax money for any good for society so better not to give them any.
@@wvjeepguy8178 too strong of a word in English, maybe. I'm sorry but didn't find any better suited synonim to the ethimological meaning. And didn't want to write a philosophical essay tech media youtube content neither do a Wall of Text. Fear to strange/foreigner things, I meant. Sometimes one gets lost in translation...
Note for the external drives with microSD cards, these days they use a controller that reads some config off the beginning of the card (hence why you were prompted to format, because it's the config and not the MBR at the start) to set the capacity and USB identifiers. If you put in a card without that config, it works like a normal SD card reader. The controller is off the shelf, the only trick is they can be configured by the card. The microSD card tends to be real capacity (when you use it in a regular reader), just low quality.
Great video, thanks for looking into it and helping out the community!
A really close friend of mine and fellow IT worker got scammed on Newegg for a 2.5" Samsung SSD, after contacting Samsung and sending them pictures of the drive and the PCB they told him it was a fake, and they contacted Newegg to have them refund him.
This happened to me a few years ago. I bought a 2TB external drive, turned out to be 80GB drive. AliExpress returned my money immediately without having to return the drive AND the store disappeared a few days later. :)
EDIT: Also, two weeks ago I was trying to buy a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB. I tried ScAmazon, BestBuy Canada, and Staples, all of them wanted around $200 plus $150 for shipping ( ! ! ! ) Yes, I live in a remote area, but checking shipping rates it only costs $12 to mail me the parcel. So, I reluctantly looked to AE for one. Found a 980Pro for $203 CAN$ with free shipping. I made sure that the company had at least 1000 sales and a rating of 95% or higher positive feedback. Got my drive 3 days ago and everything is 100% legit, and registered with Samsung for warranty purposes. :)
150$ shipping 😭 that is outrageous
I bought an external HDD also, and found that it had weights inside even. Crazy lengths they go to sell these
some ssds are so light hey need weights
Why would you buy from them? Do you buy TVs out the back of a van in a dark alley too? You pay for junk you get junk wake up.
even your cat is disappointed by the results
These SSD scams were so prevalent in Facebook ads. As quickly as they showed up, they were taken down. It's shameful how much effort these scammers go through to rob people when they could go to making actual contributions instead.
Friend of mine was taken for a ride on "used almost new laptops" for $70 with good specs, and an new electric bike for a stupid price (price of a battery pack), they use average looking white folks standing alongside the boxes "in the warehouse:" so these might well be local scammers - fakecrook doesn't shut down the fake ads either, greedy thieves both of them!
I gotta say, I am impressed with the scammer's modifications to the controller to slow down write rates. That avoids getting an outright write error and gives them a way to extend the scam by creating as much confusion for the user as possible.
Since SSDs, and NVME drives in particular, allocate blocks dynamically (literally they use a key,data scheme internally where the 'key' is basically the block number), it is possible to make the SSD appear to be as large as you like. And it will even work up until the point where the flash fills up.
Since vendors put varying amounts of extra flash in real drives, the "capacity" is just a programming parameter in the controller, completely independent from the actual amount of physical flash available. The scammers programmed the parameter to be super huge and then it looks like they must have implemented a write-slow-down feature to delay actually filling up the true capacity of the flash, preventing the end-user realizing that the device is a scam.
Impressive.
-Matt
There is no speed modification. These devices usually contain two basic components: an off-the-shelf USB SD card controller along with the corresponding storage medium, and a dedicated programmable chip that implements the scam (and you can buy these chips in aliexpress). In the most simple scams, this chip is just falsely advertising the type of device and its capacity. In more elaborate scams, the chip is actually manipulating the read and write operations so that the device produces no read/write errors when exceeding its capacity. Basically, the storage is overwritten in round-robin fashion which will produce data loss but no write errors. So, some testing software that uses "small" test files is not able to easily detect the scam. The only very noticeable problem is the slow transfer speed.
There are multiple variants of those fake 980/990 Pros. If you deal with the retail versions of those SSDs long enough, you can immediately spot the fake ones right from the packaging. I believe there are even fake 870 Evo as well (seen the packaging, the text is way off from the real ones).
a n i m e
n
i
m
e
Yeah I have a 980 and a 980 Pro, and I immediately thought; what a weird font for the text.
@@OGruurdThe font screams cheap chinese product to me lol
@@minbcraft What do you reckon?
Chinese entities + tampering with tech = some kind of spying? is what my gut says. Inbefore they start replacing DRAM and Cache, with mini cameras & mics.
I hope I have my tin foil hat on lol.
Yeah ... especially the ones labeled as "Pors" or "Psor"
I've been into this stuff for quite awhile now and when I started to see these "So Called" good deals pop up I already had a clue to what was going on and refused to waste my time and money on this stuff. Comparing price to size is Very telling and common sense will tell most people that this is nothing but a SCAM! If Aliexpress will allow this to go on then use your common sense and Don't buy this junk!! I think it's called To Good To Be TRUE😉. I thank everyone and YOU for showing how crooked a lot of these sellers are!
exFat is actually quite common for an SSD / external device. NTFS can be inefficient / not supported by other systems.
My recent Samsung 970 Evo plus 2Tb m.2 ssd using Samsung's in house cloning software by default sets the cloning process as NTFS. Pardon the clunky writing. Still waking up. LOL
The rule is:
"If a product in Ali has less than 5 perfect stars, then it is probably a scam."
I got scammed in the same way with an ssd in Aliexpress and lost important files.
Everytime they sell these products they have 4 stars and half or less. 90% of people buy the scam and don't complain, probably because they just didn't realize. Only a 10% of people or less complain and if lucky get a refund.
From now on, I will always check the 1 star reviews, even if it was only one soul complaining.
To get full speed with these drives you need to plug in a USB mounted SC/AM adapter, it opens up the limitation. Only now for $50.
@@AnimationByDylan You have to buy more external hard drives from Ali, the SC/AM adapter is included.
Thank you SO much for taking the time to test these for us. Most of us SHOULD be aware of such scams BUT its great to see what you have done. Tis amazing they get away with it.
Nice to see OEM surplus boxes being put to 'good' use... The same sort of scams occurred shortly after USB storage drives (pen drives) hit the market... very common in China...
At least the first one isn't pernicious to the point of writing over the old data. You may well find out the scam before it bites you hard.
Very cool of you to do this.
Not only does a 980 Evo not exist. As far as I'm aware (I was looking for one a few weeks ago), Samsung doesn't even make 4TB NVME drives. The highest they go is 2TB. Western Digital makes 4TB NVME drives, but not Samsung. The only "4TB EVO" drives Samsung currently makes are 2.5 inch SATA drives.
I don't see Samsung on the packaging. People, who buy these products, need to be more attentive. Did the seller claim it was a Samsung product?
@@AntonChekhoff Exactly. These are clearly fakes, and I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the advertiser on AliExparess didn't claim they were Samsung.
"todays video is powered by..." thats one way to spin "paid for by" which is what used to be the common tagline spoken
At least it wasen't an Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU paied promotion xD. ( These processors have massive stability issues and manufacturing contamination causing corrosion and CPU dying ).
AliExpress = Chinese scammer heaven.
When choosing carefully and using your brain this can be heaven for you as buyer too!
if one of these stores would be anywhere around my house....next day it would be in the newspaper burned down due to an electrical fault...marchandise included..
I think for those M.2 drives they took some generic drive and reprogrammed the controller so that the speed would approach 0 as the drive reached its real capacity.
If a real SSD has the controller forced to a size larger than it actually has it will probably just drop speed to zero because it can't find any more empty block. Also with less capacity left the drive drops speed naturally, it's just how SSDs work
Kitty seems to have a keen scent for scams!
The moment i saw the transfer speed of the 64TB drive i got the feeling it was just an enclosure with a small flash card inside. I've never used AliExpress and likely never will, I tend to go to established tech retailers even if it means paying a small premium for peace of mind.
Yeah really no reason to use it unless you have very specific needs for electronic components. Consumer products? Better stay away
@@vocassen It mostly depends on where you live. Where I'm from Amazon is both more expensive and slower, so I'd more often get things from Ali.
I got replacement cushions for my HD6XX, a Wok, Noctua NF-A9 fans, Phantex T30 fans, a torque wrench, IEMs(Tin T2 and Moondrop Starfield), CPUs(Haswell and Skylake), a whole bunch of dev boards and electronic components, and a bunch of other stuff I don't even remember.
Never got scammed. Not even once. And whenever something didn't arrive or couldn't be sent either the seller or Ali would issue a refund.
I'm not saying it's perfectly safe or as good as Amazon in terms of customer service and protection, but in the utter majority of cases you're going to get what you paid for.
Just use it for anything non tech related.
@@guycxz Those CPUs they sold you are likely ES or QS and not production qualified / ready.
They aren't allowed to sell production ready CPUs that aren't crippled in their market. We have very strict control over what they are allowed to keep and sell.
Yeah, I bought one of those 40Tb USB SSDs, sort of expected it to be bogus, which it was. It came up as being "there" as a connected device, but writing files into it got progressively slower . . . and slower . . . and slower, and finally died in the process. Apparently they have some software trick to make it look like xxTb, but in reality, a few Gb is what's there, and basically unusable. Amazingly, I actually got a refund (from Wish) though it took several weeks. Quite fun watching your video . . . thanks.
The funny thing is that I actually bought a 64GB MicroSDXC card from AliExpress for my Nintendo Switch. Price was around what you'd expect, and the performance was also as advertised (around 10x the speed of the product Roman actually received, lmao). It wasn't a deal that sounded too good to be true though. 😅
I'm amazed. The only storage I've bought from them that worked was from the official Samsung store 😭
Aliexpress is not a scam per se, and you can get plenty of good quality stuff in there, you just have to buy from you reputable brands and stay away from "too good to be true" deals.
It's items like this that completely ruin the reputation of Ali Express. I don't buy anything from their site and I tell my customers to not to buy anything from them either.
Great video 👏👏 keep up the good work u save people alot of money 💰💰
Be wary of buying SD cards from Amazon. Even ones sold by Amazon are fake.
Amazon is fake
That's not my experience (so far). Also, if I were to get something fake from Amazon they would take it back and refund as soon as UPS picks it up and logs it in, not tell me that I can have a refund if I ship it back to China at a cost that's 100 times more than the product is worth.
Only if you buy from 3rd party. If you buy with Prime you will get legitimate products shipped from the manufacturer to Amazon. 3rd party and second-hand / warehouse deals do not count.
@@tralfazy Very hard to tell a good fake. Visually they are almost perfect now, even the packaging. A good fake will also have performance that is atleast barely in the ball park.
The problem btw is not that Amazon willingly sells fakes, the problem is that (some) Amazon 3rd party vendors are scammers and sell fakes with shipping with Amazon *and* Amazon will then combine the inventory of all vendors that sell a product and their own inventory, so if you order SD card x with seller Amazon you might actually get the Sd card from seller ScamMaster3000 and the other way around someone that orders from ScamMaster3000 with Amazon Shipping might get the genuine Amazon stock.
@@snakeplissken8887 I have heard of cases where even Amazons supply chain has become contaminated with fakes (from what i know it tends to only be specialist stores that get their products directly from the manufacturer, there are companies which form the link between retail stores/online stores and the manufacturer)
It could even be the case that amazon doesn’t keep the stocks of different sellers separate (so you could buy a product and receive a product that was sent to amazons warehouse by a different seller)
Even well known physical stores have ended up with fake products on the shelves
New sub from Canada, PS love how your cat's just laying on your table and not caring about what's going on around him/her lol
You have to be careful when plug those fake disk. They usually come with malware hidden within the hard drive partition or within the chip itself.
How do yo know? ;-)
Thank You Roman for showing others how this SCAM is done. I tell a lot of people but im unknown lol
On Aliexpress you don't get scammed, you get what you deserve.
Useful info with unintentional feline intrusion.
I'm amazed that you plugged that crop into your computer 🖥.
I was looking at the 1080pro nvme ssd on ebay. I thought it was too good to be true. I found this video and it confirmed my suspicions. Thank you for the video!
Thanks U from France ,i'm just wondered if it was interesting to buy this kind of SSD in Aliexpress ,you gave me the answer 😅😅😅
Excellent video, I like how you go into depth and try to figure out these scams and what they use, Well done! You earned a subscriber.
Love the comparison. Excellent pacing in the presentation, btw
i remember a few years ago my friend god a 128GB thumb drive!
lol after doing in some digging i was able to figure it was only a 2GB
I really really love that little NVMe/SATA M.2 data extraction gadget you featured!!!! Awesome idea!
The "M.2" SSD and atleast probably not a micro SD card inside. They are more "legit" scams, but still worthless! :) Great you took this up! There is also scams of micro-SD and USB drives. :(
I'm surprised the first one had anything inside at all. They like to pretend their "enclosure" is an SSD and list the max specs for a device you *could* put inside.
Good review, and thank you for the effort to spread this awareness about ssd scam, and also, that's is one cute orange tabby cat :D
Orders from Ali Express then complains about it being a scam.
AliExpress is such a crapshoot, yet people just keep spending money on the off chance 🤣
You're very knowledgeable on the matter of tech. Hope all your other videos are as good and with the same translation.
I feel sorry for the people that actually fall for this...
They're add descriptions are almost always very cryptic, Be very careful of the fine print. They are very slow in shipping and in cases like this that is good, gives you time to cancel. Of products I have gotten from them , finally, have been OK and work. But I feel you are very correct in this case and cancelled the one I ordered. Good work sir.
The effort you put opening those things made me subscribe
More importantly, never plug any USB device on your computer that is not from a trusted source. There are malwares that can infect your computer by just pluggin it in.
I use a linux machine to wipe the drive and blast the partition table...i sometimes buy refurb drives
Great video. Samsung m.2 drives are awsome. As far as I'm aware Samsung is the only major company that hasn't a 4Tb drive on the market.
apologies. only just now, after all these years, subbed.
Great timing for me on this video as I was looking at some of the NVME drives on Alibaba, I know they are fake and are using old chips and controllers. With the outright lie of capacity and speed is enough to detour from any purchase. Then with anything is the reliability of this garbage. Should have learned my lesson from the SSD I bought a while back that would pop in and out of Windows and was really slow. Couldn't even use for file transferring as it would just stop reading after a bit. Good Video!
yeah o got scam in ali express too. i will never buy any thing electronic expensive there.
Good thing you have a test bench, I would be greatly worried plugging this in where it can inject malware and whatnot.
Why would you even buy an SSD or RAM from AliExpress? You had it coming. 😂
Educational and helpful video. Bonus: seeing the cute cat's feet, tail and behind.
Thank you for a great review - excellent job.
"I got scammed", or "I gave money to scammers willingly so I can make content on painfully obvious fake products"
I love how "I bought something that is clearly a scam, let me plug it into my computer"
So Markiplier just got scammed out of like $400
hahahaha , just love your cat's indifference, LOOOL (you do what you have to do, I will just mind my own business here, IN YOUR FACE!)
As a very young boy I learned that no matter WHAT it is, unless you're at a garage sale or yard sale (those are big here in the States) most likely if it sounds too good to be true, IT IS.
sheik is very patient with you.. ruining their rest with scammy boxes on his feet
new Fear unlocked
What's common with these is the drive will accept that much advertised data, But what it's really doing is filling up and then overwriting to go past the real storage capacity.
This worries me because some people aren't educated enough to know that these are too good to be true.
Unfortunately, as usual, the Chinese cheats. Nothing changes... Let's just stop dealing with these scammers.
I like this kind of work (investigative) good job.
I have never seen a CPU casing as the one in the sponsor segment. But somehow I really like the aesthetics of it.
I have a bunch of "1TB" "blue" 2.5" SSDs that I got from someone out of curiosity. They're all 128GB SSDs (about half have 2 nand chips, about half have 4 nand chips), and the controller is some Realtek thing with the info etched off. There is a Realtek SSD/NAND tool floating around somewhere that will tell you the NAND info, and that's how I figured it out. If there were a way to reprogram this controller to reflect the flash's actual size, at least then the SSDs would be usable in some capacity. But as it stands, you just can't risk using them.
I can put my SanDisc USB 512GB on my pinky finger and it still looks small in comparison. I paid maybe 25 euro(?)
For the external usb drives, one would just have to flash/hack the ssd/SD card controller to show a false number. It's similar to gpu flashing where for example a Nvidia GTS 450 shows up as a RTX 2060.
It is more elaborate than that. The scam chip produces a false advertisement. But it also intercepts the read/write operations so that there are no errors when there is an operation over the real capacity of the device. These devices usually allow you to write any amount of data to the device because they overwrite the storage when the capacity is reached. So, you never get a write error despite the data loss. And this is what makes this scam dangerous: casual users that trust amazon and other major retailers, will write data on these devices and never get a write error. Only later will they find that older data is either corrupted or simply gone.
Thank you, this is what I have always suspected, having had a bad experience with a couple of USB cards, one didn't even work 😮 . Greetings from UK 🇬🇧 😊🇷🇺
Me too, but I got my money back via PayPal, but you have to go to the seller first which is like being on a roundabout 😡😡
Never ever buy anything from that particular Chinese source. I've had a few reasons for tears purchasing from them, I gave them a second chance, then a third, then nonononono to any more.
Yeah well it's Ali Express you shouldn't expect anything else!
Your problem is your desktop wallpaper.
Power users always set their desktop wallpaper to solid black.
You can have any color you want, as long as it's solid black.
Funny after watching your video. TH-cam advertising a scam video on exactly same external SSD you just viewed.
I love how Roman could barely get through the intro without almost laughing.