@@CraftComputing It's going to come down and make a comment, but I was trying to figure out what I was going to comment. Got down into the comments and found out somebody had already made the best comment....so I just gave them an angry up vote.
Buddy got three "2TB" external SSDs and gave me one. It was lighter than my flash drive on my keychain. Spudged it open. Micro SD card on a carrier caddy. And scammers will always scam.
The "speaker man" would have a really hard time even grabbing my attention. If I want something I got and search for it myself. It's just unbelievable how dumb all these fake storage scams are. Eventually it will fill up and corrupt the data. A sucker born every minute.
So. Story time. I bought two 4 TB Gen4 x4 drives during Amazon's October prime day. Acer Predator GM7000. I didn't get the array to plug them into until today. When I took them out of the boxes last night, alarm bells went off. One was black, one was blue. The heat dissipation strips were on opposite sides of the drives. Hmmm. Weirdly, the one with the heat tape FACING THE MOTHERBOARD is the one that shows as 4tb. In the array, the other drive doesn't show at all. I plugged it into an external enclosure and plugged that into my windows usb c port - it had 238gb of totally unallocated space. Needless to say, I returned it. But I didn't pay $35. I paid $220. I am not going to use the "good" 4tb in the array - I'm going to use my NvME duplicator to try to copy the contents of an existing 1tb drive to it. See if it blows up. If it does, it's going back too.
Sounds like a return scam - someone bought a legit one and returned a fake. I've bought car parts before and opened the box to find someone else's worn out, used parts sealed inside...
There is a program that you can use to verify sizes of discs. I think I've seen it on computer clan, when they were testing SD cards....this would be the better way to go, it would be quicker. My suggestion though is to send them all back....
It happened to me about 15 years ago. I told the guy I was gonna go get cash from the ATM and I dipped lmao. It seemed like a scam to me so I went with my gut and split
19:40 I think this is the most important point. The "unfiltered" market (as with these wide-open market places) is such a mess to navigate. Unknown brands with real products (often lower end, but can be completely acceptable), known brands with real products, faked known brands with fake products, and of course also just faked products. Full spectrum chaos 👍
I saw the thumbnail on this video and immediately clicked. Great DS9 In the Pale Moonlight reference with that. I don't think anyone else could have done it better haha. Love your work mate!
FYI, Netac is actually a fairly legitimate brand. Not top tier performance, but still fairly reliable. I have a couple of their drives and have no issues with them.
They are not as reliable as you'd think. Sandisk, Crucial, and Samsung are better, but they cost way more. I have an issue with an 8GB Netac MicroSD that came with my 3D printer that I am too cheap to replace right now where it only holds up to like 2GB of files (not that many files). I never loaded the full 8GB on the MicroSD but I have loaded more than 2GB on the card so I know there is something wrong with the MicroSD. Netac is the only brand of card that I have had go bad. As a cheap pack in card, it served its purpose. When it fully dies, I'll probably replace it.
@@matthewjbauer1990 I've had numerous MicroSD cards from numerous brands go bad. I was just stating my own experience with multiple of their SSD drives. I've never used one of their MicroSD cards, so I can't speak to the quality of those. Crystal Disk Info tells me my Netac 1TB drive in my main PC currently has 5381 hours of power on time and is at 96% health, with over 25TB of reads and writes.
I still don't get how people are unable to separate cheap in this case (KingSpec, CUSU, Netac, ect.) real products with corners cut somewhere to make it cheaper, and an obviously too good to be true scam.
I'm not sure there is a solid line you can draw between them. During the shortage I ended up getting a Kingspec (from their official AliExpress store) and not only did it get crazy hot but they had modified the firmware to lie about the temp and never go over 50C. Write speeds dropped to 40MB/s after 200MB written continuously. Seemed like a scam to me.
I do pc stuff for my local technoshop, had a couple of examples of this scam come my way in the last 2 years One a 32GB flash drive masquerading as 1TB, one a 64GB external SSD posing as 1TB. In both cases the storage was our old friend the micro SD card. In both cases the buyers just didn't get the too good to be true part. They hear you get cheap stuff on the internet, they check out the prices, they think full retail price for well known brands is a rip-off, they think that 20% less than that for less well known brands is slightly less of a rip-off, so half the price of one of those has got to be the real deal. Basically, they're looking through the wrong end of the scamoscope. The guy with the flash drive went so far as to take it to another shop claiming that I was trying to scam him into paying full retail for a replacement, despite the fact that I hadn't even tried to sell him anything.
'h2testw' is a handy utility which will test by trying to write and verify full capacity, made for detecting this sort of fraudulent USB drives. Not sure I want to wait to test 4Tb even at nvme speed...
16:00 I would expect the reason it slowed down was that as soon as it wrapped round the controller would need to also start erasing blocks before writing them (since trim is useless when there's less NAND than the OS thinks there is). I am impressed that it did genuinely write at that speed though. I've seen low end genuine NVMe drives slow down MUCH more than that.
Australia, was asked by some white van guys in 2010. So very much still a thing.. I remember there was a Full episode on the drama Tv show neighbours about it. Episodes 4441-4444 😂
One of the way to achieve the same is to copy a partition table from a larger drive as long as the format is exfat. Windows will be happy to quick format and report the fake capacity. Wiping the partitions clean would reveal the real drive capacity. The fake USB flash drives would usually still malfunction even when used for their real capacity as the flash (or often ad card) used is a reject.
I heard that what they do is they take drives that didn't pass QC and then those are the ones that they flash. This means that even if you were to reflash the drive to have the correct capacity and everything that you don't know what else is wrong with the drive and the nand may fail sooner than a normal drive or the right speeds may be horribly slow or whatever else will make the drive not usable.
I know I know you did it on purpose, but there is a software to test these fake capacity drives. The OG is H2testw but there are others too, and for Mac/Linux there is f3 tools.
I've noticed that the fake drives tend to come pre-formatted. If you try to format them, they always break. The most accurate error I got was "device size mismatch." I've run into this with USB thumb drives, USB external SSD drives, and even an M.2. The strangest one was a device that the packaging stated was a "2TB M.2 external SSD." Inside the box it looked like a custom case for an M.2 with a USB-C port. When I took the device apart, it was essentially a USB-C micro SD reader with a 256mb micro SD card and an extra IC. The IC told the computer you were plugging in a 2tb drive formatted as NTFS. Without the micro SD on the board, the computer stated it was a read-only device. With any blank micro SD on the board, it would show up as a read/write device. Any attempts to format the device, replace the partition table, create a new partition, remove a partition, etc, would all fail with a write/sync type error that was never very useful.
The address is almost correct, one wrong digit. Ireland doesn't usually use post codes, and PO boxes are special anyway, they're on their own routing system.
I love Rouge Ale. Was at a bar with friends in like 2005 or 2006, we asked the waitress to suggest something they had on tap, and she recommended Dead Guy. That was all we drank all night. Thanks for the info about Dead & Dead. Sounds like something really worth trying! Also, love me a good tale of computer scams, lol. Remember when you could install a RAM Doubler?!
I've used a Fanxiang NVME drive for over 2 years now with no issues, and I've got multiple PUSkill NVME drives working as expected, but the oldest is only a year. I trust them enough to use them as boot drives now, but they can be cheap game drives too.
The nice thing about NVME drives is that they can't just hide a MicroSD card there but might under the label (hoping no one would look). More realistically they are more likely to just use a cheaper NAND chip that is not just lower capacity but also unbearably slow.
The best cheap 4TB nvme i've found is the teamgroup MP34.. it has dram cache, 2400TBW rating and 5yr warrantee (at least here in australia) for just under 200 usd and it's been available here around that price for over a year from a few of my trusted shops. I bought one as a test almost a year ago and it hasn't given me any trouble.
This is why I only buy from brands that have been around a long time and only if the price is average for what drives sell at, excepting sales. Even if it's legit and really cheap, there's always a catch.
Thumbnail is exact line from DS9 where the romulan commander is holding the faked recording data node. When I read the thumbnail I read it in his voice. 🤣
The drive is pre-formatted so that it lies to you. These things come with instructions NOT to format them as doing so will cause problems. A reformat will either show the true size or it will crash your machine as it tries to write to non existent areas.
The art of the Aliscam is also pricing. Under $50 is considered on average to be under the amount worthwhile to get a refund. Most people will just throw it in the bin. Maybe just even reflash the bios. $43 is high end what you pay for a 120Gb.
The "SSD" is half of the speed of the inexpensive UHS-I SD card I use in my stills camera lmao. Re: the speaker scam, a family friend bought a super cheap surround sound system from a guy in a parking lot.. yeah the speakers were full of concrete. Interestingly that was in the late 2000s
You can still sometimes use a microscope and alcohol (I don't know why, but some sort of fluid) can help you see, if the laser wasn't set to go TOO deep. (def never tried to uncover a lost chip label before...)
My friend fell for those electronics scams a couple times. Dude would buy anything... it's crazy. -One was a stereo system, a "Morantz" receiver and tower speakers. I could tell it looked fake. He thought it was such a bad ass deal to pay like 500 bucks for something worth a few thousand. It sounded like garbage turned up more than halfway. -Next was a "4000" watt subwoofer amp, he found it on ebay for like 200. I told him no way that's legit. He got it anyway. I estimated it was pushing less than 1000W before it started clipping. I hooked up my legit 750W Alpine amp to his subs and it was about the same loudness. Oh yeah, wanted to add, when it burned out I took it apart before he tossed it and it was almost empty inside, lol. -The last one I remember was a "12 megapixel" point-and-shoot camera for like $80. This was in like ~2006. He liked my 5MP Canon Elph I just bought for a few hundred and thought he could one up me. It was bad, like maybe 2MP and as good of an image processor as a webcam. He was pretty upset, lol.
It's probably Phison or some other common controller for which you can find the tools that can read their configuration and NANDs behind the controller
scammers counterfeit products are usually full of mistakes in their marketing and packaging. it blows my mind how the authorities don't shut down these websites and stores, not to mention the target companies not sueing these scammers.
Sometimes it's good to be a newb when it comes to beer. I just got a 4-pack of Dead N' Dead,and the first can I thought was great! I'll try and keep one to age to see if it improves.
I hate to drag this out.... The new(er) "tech" has no dram. So, some of the lower end drives (looking at you TeamGroup!) do the gimmick of "SLC" cache to increase the speed of the drive to the advertised speeds and then the speed drops to the actual speed of the actual storage chips themselves (anywhere from say 30mb to 90mb) for the remainder of the drive. If you happened to only write to the size of the SLC cache and you are done, over the time of the non-usage period the drive is supposed to move the data at a slower rate into the actual TLC or QLC structure and then reclaim some portion of what's left for further SLC cache usage and repeat the cycle. The size of the SLC is usually anywhere from 1/4 of the drive to 1/3 of the drive's rated capacity, but can be lower. The higher end M.2 drives tend to have DRAM or some other method to maintain the speed over the whole drive. If this is not actually overwriting the data, it may be some sort of (potentially extreme) version of SLC cache. ...but that's my POV and I still would not buy it.
This exact drive scams been goin on for over a year now. I did a video on the 2tb 980 pro fake. They were selling them on eBay. The packaging that I had on mine looks nearly identical to the real drive.
I'm with you on the ale. Too bright, too sour, too young. Not enough of those complex flavors that you get in a good bourbon barrel. As for scam drives - I once had to tell an enthusiastic but inexperienced techy why the new usb flash drives he got off ebay for a really good deal were not working
All I could think of was pale moonlight at first. And then it Immediately went to Sisko saying "IT IS REAL, I CREATED IT AND ITS REAL!". God I should rewatch DS9
You could create a bunch of 1GB files with random data and record hash values for each. Then move them over to the scam disk and regenerate hashes. No way to fake that if the data isn't there, and you don't have to go through each file manually like with videos.
There are apps for that and honestly I'm disappointed the video didn't show any, the "just copy until it breaks" approach is good to show the principle, but people should get educated about tools like h2testw (which just writes the data and reads it afterwards) or ValiDrive (which does random read/write cycles, giving out a result pretty quickly). Protip - for SD cards, you can find cheap and good quality 64gig ones, but you need to make sure you check the buyers' feedback, many users already tested theirs with h2testw so you can find a reliable products this way.
3:38 that is IE not LE. That address does not have a zipcode (Eircode for Ireland) cause PO Boxes in Ireland don't use them. Their UK address option provided there has the GU46 6GG post code. That line is Identical (minus the missing S) to what is listed on all real Samsung drives. The Yateley address is actually their QA Lab building.
It's a SiliconMotion controller, which is a red flag even in a branded NVMe, since it is DRAM-less and buggy AF. Judging by speed dips there is something like small 4bit NAND as cache + large capacity cheapest TF grade flash silicon encapsulated in each of usual NAND packages.
I got caught out recently - different kind of scam however - looked like a normal used SSD (2.5") at a normal used price, so no alarms there. However when I got the drive, they had removed the electronics from the casing, and all I got was the shell. Pretty blatant fraud! Not even subtle like a capacity spoof, just a hollow shell - and I didn't even notice until I went to plug it in and.. huh?
I have an explanation why the transfer starts really slow and then gets faster as i observed the same on a 100% legit 4 TB SSD myself. It has to do with Windows calculating and indexing all the files it has to transfer and if you copy 100s of TB this is completely normal. I almost was fooled myself by this and first thought "It has to be due to a "slow" USB 2.0 Transfer Speed but that could not really be with a PC that has only 3.0 and 3.1 ports. So nothing to worry, once the "inventory" was done i saw transfer speeds of 700 MB/s up to 1.0 Gigabyte for the first time in my life! The most recent, not PCI Gen4 SSDs are extremely impressive as they can reach speeds a couple of years ago we could only see in Memory R/W Operations.
I always tell my clients if they're shopping for cheap tech on Amazon etc, among other things always check the seller's details. If it's in the PRC, avoid. Buyer beware has always been good advice and always will be. Some of them don't, they think that not getting scammed is someone else's responsibility not theirs, some are unaware of even the possibility of being scammed, and some don't get the too good to be true thing, they're basically looking through the wrong end of the scamoscope and think that higher prices for known brands are the ripoff. As for Amazon et al, try a little mental exercise. Imagine you set up an online store on which anyone can sell stuff. How are you going to proactively prevent scams and how much is that going to cost you? Personally I think Amazon etc could do a better job of warning buyers, but even then you'll always get people who ignore anything they don't want to see.
Funny thing is, this scam isn't just set to Ali express, I had the same thing happen to me on amazon with a 970 1tb, didn't notice it till a few months AFTER the warranty ran out... couldn't RMA, lost the full MSRP on it too so that really sucks.
I have an actual 4TB 990 drive bought from the computer store... skeptical of any online "deals". It's a great laptop drive when m.2 is at a premium space wise
whe in the netherlands had a scam with pagers in the early years, a pager is called a Pieper in dutch, but a pieper is also a Patato in dutch. So they would scam you by sending you a patato
I don’t understand why the take the time to fake it and sell it for $40. Just sell it as a cheap ssd with its actual size. They’ll still sell fine on Amazon.
The point is to get a quick burst of cash with a high margin, then disappear. Scammers don't WANT to run a successful company. They don't care about real work. It's about fast cash and feeling clever. In the modern world, they don't even have to work to make their own scams anymore. I guarantee the person who salvaged/modified/packaged those drives is not the same one selling them. "The Goods" are a product that the scammers are buying. Probably for $5 a piece in this case. Then they dump them on the market and run. There might even be a 3rd player handling the "marketing" part. Scams like this are regularly elevated in search results by "marketers" that specialize in pushing scam brands. So, you have a scammer that does little to no work. They buy their goods pre-faked. They create a burner vendor account. (Unless THIS stage is also 3rd party...) They pay a fee to have their product juiced by a shady marketer. They get the product out the door until they sell out or questions start being asked. Then they abandon the account and start again with a different scam. The thing people don't want to hear is that there is an entire logistics system in place here, like all other shady systems. It requires participation and organization to do this stuff. It's not just a "bad guy" in a basement doing it alone. I've had friends who told me about whatever thing they were doing, and my response has been "You know that's part of a scam right?" Their response has been "Don't know. Don't care. I'm making money. Who cares if some idiot loses?" They are no longer friends. It takes a special kind of shitty person to knowingly hurt others like that. ...except it's way to common a reaction for it to be considered "special".
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul Actually not. People nowadays are smarter. In theory, they could list the legitimate 128GB capacity on Amazon under a real sounding brand for $20 and people will buy it for a boot only drive. But to make it a $30 4TB on Ali Express, the mere fact its Ali Express alone will tell off people.
@@marcogenovesi8570 I never claimed they were making them from scratch. But they are being "made". Whether salvaged entirely, salvaged parts on new boards, salvaged parts on salvaged boards. There is a "manufacturing" step, and its not being done by the scammer themselves. This is an organized system, with people at different levels doing different jobs.
thinking that the act of drinking is an important personality trait is kind of annoying and not relevant at all, but your content is good so here I am.
The problem with Aliexpress is they side with the seller in such cases. Hard to get your money back. Now often they use free return and that is the only option you can choose. So no more refund/partial refund.
That means u make purchases wrong way, use some card with wallet in (IRC Paypal have own card) u open dispute with seller and go to your card provider for CHARGEBACK procedure to be launched, That's make even playfiled Seller and AE vs You and one of big 4 (Visa/MC/etc)
You get what you pay for. I've learned this the hard way so many times. I am to the point in life where I would rather spent more money up front from a brand I know and has a good reputation behind their products. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The easiest way to catch this. Move one large video file. Right click and select copy. Put it in a folder. Right click folder to cooy into another. And repeat untill full. It doubles every time.
Seen those, realised they are fake within 2 seconds, so it's very hard to understand anyone falling for it, it's like people who fill a hard drive with bit coin and then allow the situation where it gets thrown in the bin😮
In recent years I have gotten some of these that were not really all that huge for just a little better than competitive prices. So like if average price is like $40 for something you might see it come in at like $38. Then when you check the reviews you see artifacts of AI
4TB for $35 - Wow ! ..... So far purchased 5 64GB USB thumb drives , and I verified all for capacity . Win some lose some . Don't forget to look for hidden partitions !
Fun fact Ireland *DOES* have postal codes. They were introduced in 2014 and are known as Eircode. Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system.
Unbelievable thumbnail. I will have to watch this video later, In the Pale Moonlight.
I can live with it
The best episode.
Garak really cemented his role in that episode
Yeah I got the DS9 reference immediately too! 👍
@@CraftComputing
It's going to come down and make a comment, but I was trying to figure out what I was going to comment. Got down into the comments and found out somebody had already made the best comment....so I just gave them an angry up vote.
I have a mild AliExpress addiction. I see these all the time and I remember thinking “oh they’re doing NVME now”
Buddy got three "2TB" external SSDs and gave me one. It was lighter than my flash drive on my keychain. Spudged it open. Micro SD card on a carrier caddy.
And scammers will always scam.
No bolt to add weight then, really skimping on the scam.
@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse
Bolts are expensive!
ah yes, classic Senator Vreenak (LOVE DS9 "In the pale moonlite")
I also clicked for the DS9 reference. Best Star Trek.
Came here to say this, easily a top 5 Trek episode
Friend of mine absolutely got fleeced on the white-van speaker scam. I was with him at the time and told him to not do it, but he did it anyway.
The "speaker man" would have a really hard time even grabbing my attention. If I want something I got and search for it myself. It's just unbelievable how dumb all these fake storage scams are. Eventually it will fill up and corrupt the data. A sucker born every minute.
Don't let any plain simple tailors hear you call it a fake.
It would only be something he overheard when hemming a pair of trousers.
Dam you beat me to it!
Played to perfection by Andrew Robinson.
So. Story time. I bought two 4 TB Gen4 x4 drives during Amazon's October prime day. Acer Predator GM7000. I didn't get the array to plug them into until today. When I took them out of the boxes last night, alarm bells went off. One was black, one was blue. The heat dissipation strips were on opposite sides of the drives. Hmmm. Weirdly, the one with the heat tape FACING THE MOTHERBOARD is the one that shows as 4tb. In the array, the other drive doesn't show at all. I plugged it into an external enclosure and plugged that into my windows usb c port - it had 238gb of totally unallocated space. Needless to say, I returned it. But I didn't pay $35. I paid $220. I am not going to use the "good" 4tb in the array - I'm going to use my NvME duplicator to try to copy the contents of an existing 1tb drive to it. See if it blows up. If it does, it's going back too.
Sounds like a return scam - someone bought a legit one and returned a fake. I've bought car parts before and opened the box to find someone else's worn out, used parts sealed inside...
There is a program that you can use to verify sizes of discs. I think I've seen it on computer clan, when they were testing SD cards....this would be the better way to go, it would be quicker.
My suggestion though is to send them all back....
@@montecorbit8280 There are multiple such programs. I run Linux so I use F3 (short for Fight Flash Fraud).
I can confirm the speaker scam is still happening.
My stepdad fell for this with an Ashton & Ross set that sounded worse than the speakers they replaced. That was roughly 15 years ago.
It happened to me about 15 years ago. I told the guy I was gonna go get cash from the ATM and I dipped lmao. It seemed like a scam to me so I went with my gut and split
You have reminded me it’s been about 15 years since my last DS9 watch through. I need to get on that.
19:40 I think this is the most important point. The "unfiltered" market (as with these wide-open market places) is such a mess to navigate. Unknown brands with real products (often lower end, but can be completely acceptable), known brands with real products, faked known brands with fake products, and of course also just faked products. Full spectrum chaos 👍
quality In The Pale Moonlight reference
Computer: Erase that entire personal log!
Ok, you got me with the thumbnail. I blame DS9 for being the best Star Trek show.
I saw the thumbnail on this video and immediately clicked. Great DS9 In the Pale Moonlight reference with that. I don't think anyone else could have done it better haha. Love your work mate!
FYI, Netac is actually a fairly legitimate brand. Not top tier performance, but still fairly reliable. I have a couple of their drives and have no issues with them.
They are not as reliable as you'd think. Sandisk, Crucial, and Samsung are better, but they cost way more. I have an issue with an 8GB Netac MicroSD that came with my 3D printer that I am too cheap to replace right now where it only holds up to like 2GB of files (not that many files). I never loaded the full 8GB on the MicroSD but I have loaded more than 2GB on the card so I know there is something wrong with the MicroSD. Netac is the only brand of card that I have had go bad. As a cheap pack in card, it served its purpose. When it fully dies, I'll probably replace it.
@@matthewjbauer1990 I've had numerous MicroSD cards from numerous brands go bad. I was just stating my own experience with multiple of their SSD drives. I've never used one of their MicroSD cards, so I can't speak to the quality of those. Crystal Disk Info tells me my Netac 1TB drive in my main PC currently has 5381 hours of power on time and is at 96% health, with over 25TB of reads and writes.
I still don't get how people are unable to separate cheap in this case (KingSpec, CUSU, Netac, ect.) real products with corners cut somewhere to make it cheaper, and an obviously too good to be true scam.
I'm not sure there is a solid line you can draw between them. During the shortage I ended up getting a Kingspec (from their official AliExpress store) and not only did it get crazy hot but they had modified the firmware to lie about the temp and never go over 50C. Write speeds dropped to 40MB/s after 200MB written continuously. Seemed like a scam to me.
I do pc stuff for my local technoshop, had a couple of examples of this scam come my way in the last 2 years One a 32GB flash drive masquerading as 1TB, one a 64GB external SSD posing as 1TB. In both cases the storage was our old friend the micro SD card. In both cases the buyers just didn't get the too good to be true part. They hear you get cheap stuff on the internet, they check out the prices, they think full retail price for well known brands is a rip-off, they think that 20% less than that for less well known brands is slightly less of a rip-off, so half the price of one of those has got to be the real deal. Basically, they're looking through the wrong end of the scamoscope. The guy with the flash drive went so far as to take it to another shop claiming that I was trying to scam him into paying full retail for a replacement, despite the fact that I hadn't even tried to sell him anything.
Senator Vreenak would be proud.
Love your DS9 reference.
'h2testw' is a handy utility which will test by trying to write and verify full capacity, made for detecting this sort of fraudulent USB drives. Not sure I want to wait to test 4Tb even at nvme speed...
Best trek episode of any of the series 👌
16:00 I would expect the reason it slowed down was that as soon as it wrapped round the controller would need to also start erasing blocks before writing them (since trim is useless when there's less NAND than the OS thinks there is).
I am impressed that it did genuinely write at that speed though. I've seen low end genuine NVMe drives slow down MUCH more than that.
White van speakers persisted well past the 80s, especially on college campuses. I helped a friend avoid getting ripped off in 1998.
Had some "great" "deals" offered to me from a van in 2008 and 2022.
Australia, was asked by some white van guys in 2010. So very much still a thing..
I remember there was a Full episode on the drama Tv show neighbours about it. Episodes 4441-4444 😂
One of the way to achieve the same is to copy a partition table from a larger drive as long as the format is exfat. Windows will be happy to quick format and report the fake capacity.
Wiping the partitions clean would reveal the real drive capacity. The fake USB flash drives would usually still malfunction even when used for their real capacity as the flash (or often ad card) used is a reject.
I heard that what they do is they take drives that didn't pass QC and then those are the ones that they flash. This means that even if you were to reflash the drive to have the correct capacity and everything that you don't know what else is wrong with the drive and the nand may fail sooner than a normal drive or the right speeds may be horribly slow or whatever else will make the drive not usable.
I know I know you did it on purpose, but there is a software to test these fake capacity drives. The OG is H2testw but there are others too, and for Mac/Linux there is f3 tools.
I've noticed that the fake drives tend to come pre-formatted. If you try to format them, they always break. The most accurate error I got was "device size mismatch." I've run into this with USB thumb drives, USB external SSD drives, and even an M.2. The strangest one was a device that the packaging stated was a "2TB M.2 external SSD." Inside the box it looked like a custom case for an M.2 with a USB-C port. When I took the device apart, it was essentially a USB-C micro SD reader with a 256mb micro SD card and an extra IC. The IC told the computer you were plugging in a 2tb drive formatted as NTFS. Without the micro SD on the board, the computer stated it was a read-only device. With any blank micro SD on the board, it would show up as a read/write device. Any attempts to format the device, replace the partition table, create a new partition, remove a partition, etc, would all fail with a write/sync type error that was never very useful.
The address is almost correct, one wrong digit. Ireland doesn't usually use post codes, and PO boxes are special anyway, they're on their own routing system.
i didnt know this was a thing yet.. thank you for sharing
I love Rouge Ale. Was at a bar with friends in like 2005 or 2006, we asked the waitress to suggest something they had on tap, and she recommended Dead Guy. That was all we drank all night. Thanks for the info about Dead & Dead. Sounds like something really worth trying!
Also, love me a good tale of computer scams, lol. Remember when you could install a RAM Doubler?!
I've used a Fanxiang NVME drive for over 2 years now with no issues, and I've got multiple PUSkill NVME drives working as expected, but the oldest is only a year. I trust them enough to use them as boot drives now, but they can be cheap game drives too.
The nice thing about NVME drives is that they can't just hide a MicroSD card there but might under the label (hoping no one would look). More realistically they are more likely to just use a cheaper NAND chip that is not just lower capacity but also unbearably slow.
Have you tried using Gibson's Validrive to test these drives?
The best cheap 4TB nvme i've found is the teamgroup MP34.. it has dram cache, 2400TBW rating and 5yr warrantee (at least here in australia) for just under 200 usd and it's been available here around that price for over a year from a few of my trusted shops. I bought one as a test almost a year ago and it hasn't given me any trouble.
This is why I only buy from brands that have been around a long time and only if the price is average for what drives sell at, excepting sales. Even if it's legit and really cheap, there's always a catch.
Thumbnail is exact line from DS9 where the romulan commander is holding the faked recording data node. When I read the thumbnail I read it in his voice. 🤣
Someone needs to come up with drive technology that negates these scams.
Jeff needs to create a duplicate thumbnail with an arrow that says “Genuine optolithic data” and run test and compare 😂
have you tried steve gibsons Validrive?
yeah! stuck it in an nvme to usb adapter and scan it with validrive
also chipgenius may identify components
Yeah i would like to see validrive scan it.
I love the wallpaper :)
Great review of the scam and the beer, thanks Jeff. A lot of those big alcohol % beers that aren't a RIS, do need time to mature, particularly IPA's.
The drive is pre-formatted so that it lies to you. These things come with instructions NOT to format them as doing so will cause problems. A reformat will either show the true size or it will crash your machine as it tries to write to non existent areas.
The art of the Aliscam is also pricing. Under $50 is considered on average to be under the amount worthwhile to get a refund. Most people will just throw it in the bin. Maybe just even reflash the bios. $43 is high end what you pay for a 120Gb.
The "SSD" is half of the speed of the inexpensive UHS-I SD card I use in my stills camera lmao. Re: the speaker scam, a family friend bought a super cheap surround sound system from a guy in a parking lot.. yeah the speakers were full of concrete. Interestingly that was in the late 2000s
You can still sometimes use a microscope and alcohol (I don't know why, but some sort of fluid) can help you see, if the laser wasn't set to go TOO deep. (def never tried to uncover a lost chip label before...)
My friend fell for those electronics scams a couple times. Dude would buy anything... it's crazy.
-One was a stereo system, a "Morantz" receiver and tower speakers. I could tell it looked fake. He thought it was such a bad ass deal to pay like 500 bucks for something worth a few thousand. It sounded like garbage turned up more than halfway.
-Next was a "4000" watt subwoofer amp, he found it on ebay for like 200. I told him no way that's legit. He got it anyway. I estimated it was pushing less than 1000W before it started clipping. I hooked up my legit 750W Alpine amp to his subs and it was about the same loudness. Oh yeah, wanted to add, when it burned out I took it apart before he tossed it and it was almost empty inside, lol.
-The last one I remember was a "12 megapixel" point-and-shoot camera for like $80. This was in like ~2006. He liked my 5MP Canon Elph I just bought for a few hundred and thought he could one up me. It was bad, like maybe 2MP and as good of an image processor as a webcam. He was pretty upset, lol.
It's probably Phison or some other common controller for which you can find the tools that can read their configuration and NANDs behind the controller
scammers counterfeit products are usually full of mistakes in their marketing and packaging. it blows my mind how the authorities don't shut down these websites and stores, not to mention the target companies not sueing these scammers.
Coming preformatted, means the average user will not format or otherwise point any utils at the drive. It will just show up ready to go.
Sometimes it's good to be a newb when it comes to beer. I just got a 4-pack of Dead N' Dead,and the first can I thought was great! I'll try and keep one to age to see if it improves.
I hate to drag this out.... The new(er) "tech" has no dram. So, some of the lower end drives (looking at you TeamGroup!) do the gimmick of "SLC" cache to increase the speed of the drive to the advertised speeds and then the speed drops to the actual speed of the actual storage chips themselves (anywhere from say 30mb to 90mb) for the remainder of the drive. If you happened to only write to the size of the SLC cache and you are done, over the time of the non-usage period the drive is supposed to move the data at a slower rate into the actual TLC or QLC structure and then reclaim some portion of what's left for further SLC cache usage and repeat the cycle. The size of the SLC is usually anywhere from 1/4 of the drive to 1/3 of the drive's rated capacity, but can be lower. The higher end M.2 drives tend to have DRAM or some other method to maintain the speed over the whole drive. If this is not actually overwriting the data, it may be some sort of (potentially extreme) version of SLC cache. ...but that's my POV and I still would not buy it.
On the french version, they did remove an S, just on the word "sur" which was above the Samsung
This exact drive scams been goin on for over a year now. I did a video on the 2tb 980 pro fake. They were selling them on eBay. The packaging that I had on mine looks nearly identical to the real drive.
I had the white van come at me back in the day for some speakers for home theater. Comedy.
I'm with you on the ale. Too bright, too sour, too young. Not enough of those complex flavors that you get in a good bourbon barrel.
As for scam drives - I once had to tell an enthusiastic but inexperienced techy why the new usb flash drives he got off ebay for a really good deal were not working
All I could think of was pale moonlight at first. And then it Immediately went to Sisko saying "IT IS REAL, I CREATED IT AND ITS REAL!".
God I should rewatch DS9
You could create a bunch of 1GB files with random data and record hash values for each. Then move them over to the scam disk and regenerate hashes. No way to fake that if the data isn't there, and you don't have to go through each file manually like with videos.
There are apps for that and honestly I'm disappointed the video didn't show any, the "just copy until it breaks" approach is good to show the principle, but people should get educated about tools like h2testw (which just writes the data and reads it afterwards) or ValiDrive (which does random read/write cycles, giving out a result pretty quickly).
Protip - for SD cards, you can find cheap and good quality 64gig ones, but you need to make sure you check the buyers' feedback, many users already tested theirs with h2testw so you can find a reliable products this way.
h2testw is a program that does this automatically.
3:38 that is IE not LE. That address does not have a zipcode (Eircode for Ireland) cause PO Boxes in Ireland don't use them. Their UK address option provided there has the GU46 6GG post code. That line is Identical (minus the missing S) to what is listed on all real Samsung drives. The Yateley address is actually their QA Lab building.
The text was 4 microns across. Sorry my vision isn't that great IRL.
@@CraftComputing I had a Samsung drive on my desk to check if it was the same, I had to take a picture and zoom in to see, don’t blame you at all.
3:30 what they've done with the French line is just incomprehensible
Look who's back, back again, flash scam's back, tell a friend
Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back
It's a SiliconMotion controller, which is a red flag even in a branded NVMe, since it is DRAM-less and buggy AF.
Judging by speed dips there is something like small 4bit NAND as cache + large capacity cheapest TF grade flash silicon encapsulated in each of usual NAND packages.
Love the DS9 reference
Oh my, that wallpaper!
I got caught out recently - different kind of scam however - looked like a normal used SSD (2.5") at a normal used price, so no alarms there. However when I got the drive, they had removed the electronics from the casing, and all I got was the shell. Pretty blatant fraud! Not even subtle like a capacity spoof, just a hollow shell - and I didn't even notice until I went to plug it in and.. huh?
It would probably fail to format if they left it unpartitioned and formatted.
It’s not a scam. You just need to download more memory to it.
cheapest real pcie 4 x4 NVME ssd i saw was $250. and that was with some good discount on it so stay safe there people.
3:13 😂🤣
SAMSUNG ❌
AMSUNG ✅
I have an explanation why the transfer starts really slow and then gets faster as i observed the same on a 100% legit 4 TB SSD myself. It has to do with Windows calculating and indexing all the files it has to transfer and if you copy 100s of TB this is completely normal. I almost was fooled myself by this and first thought "It has to be due to a "slow" USB 2.0 Transfer Speed but that could not really be with a PC that has only 3.0 and 3.1 ports. So nothing to worry, once the "inventory" was done i saw transfer speeds of 700 MB/s up to 1.0 Gigabyte for the first time in my life! The most recent, not PCI Gen4 SSDs are extremely impressive as they can reach speeds a couple of years ago we could only see in Memory R/W Operations.
Scams like these even end up on Amazon from time to time. You would think they had better quality control....
I always tell my clients if they're shopping for cheap tech on Amazon etc, among other things always check the seller's details. If it's in the PRC, avoid. Buyer beware has always been good advice and always will be. Some of them don't, they think that not getting scammed is someone else's responsibility not theirs, some are unaware of even the possibility of being scammed, and some don't get the too good to be true thing, they're basically looking through the wrong end of the scamoscope and think that higher prices for known brands are the ripoff.
As for Amazon et al, try a little mental exercise. Imagine you set up an online store on which anyone can sell stuff. How are you going to proactively prevent scams and how much is that going to cost you? Personally I think Amazon etc could do a better job of warning buyers, but even then you'll always get people who ignore anything they don't want to see.
From time to time? You mean all the time, constantly and now
When you copy a file to the drive... Lemme like 😂 it's not nvme 🤣
Funny thing is, this scam isn't just set to Ali express, I had the same thing happen to me on amazon with a 970 1tb, didn't notice it till a few months AFTER the warranty ran out... couldn't RMA, lost the full MSRP on it too so that really sucks.
Can't wait for Jeff to pimp hand the scammer like Sisko did with Garak.
Greatest pimp-hand-strong in Star Trek history.
I have an actual 4TB 990 drive bought from the computer store... skeptical of any online "deals". It's a great laptop drive when m.2 is at a premium space wise
whe in the netherlands had a scam with pagers in the early years, a pager is called a Pieper in dutch, but a pieper is also a Patato in dutch. So they would scam you by sending you a patato
I don’t understand why the take the time to fake it and sell it for $40. Just sell it as a cheap ssd with its actual size. They’ll still sell fine on Amazon.
Higher margins
The point is to get a quick burst of cash with a high margin, then disappear.
Scammers don't WANT to run a successful company.
They don't care about real work. It's about fast cash and feeling clever.
In the modern world, they don't even have to work to make their own scams anymore.
I guarantee the person who salvaged/modified/packaged those drives is not the same one selling them.
"The Goods" are a product that the scammers are buying. Probably for $5 a piece in this case.
Then they dump them on the market and run.
There might even be a 3rd player handling the "marketing" part. Scams like this are regularly elevated in search results by "marketers" that specialize in pushing scam brands.
So, you have a scammer that does little to no work.
They buy their goods pre-faked.
They create a burner vendor account. (Unless THIS stage is also 3rd party...)
They pay a fee to have their product juiced by a shady marketer.
They get the product out the door until they sell out or questions start being asked.
Then they abandon the account and start again with a different scam.
The thing people don't want to hear is that there is an entire logistics system in place here, like all other shady systems.
It requires participation and organization to do this stuff.
It's not just a "bad guy" in a basement doing it alone.
I've had friends who told me about whatever thing they were doing, and my response has been "You know that's part of a scam right?"
Their response has been "Don't know. Don't care. I'm making money. Who cares if some idiot loses?"
They are no longer friends.
It takes a special kind of shitty person to knowingly hurt others like that.
...except it's way to common a reaction for it to be considered "special".
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul Actually not. People nowadays are smarter. In theory, they could list the legitimate 128GB capacity on Amazon under a real sounding brand for $20 and people will buy it for a boot only drive. But to make it a $30 4TB on Ali Express, the mere fact its Ali Express alone will tell off people.
This is people buying those in bulk for cheap and changing the labels/firmware. Nobody is making a full ssd like this for a scam
@@marcogenovesi8570 I never claimed they were making them from scratch.
But they are being "made". Whether salvaged entirely, salvaged parts on new boards, salvaged parts on salvaged boards.
There is a "manufacturing" step, and its not being done by the scammer themselves.
This is an organized system, with people at different levels doing different jobs.
I just watched that episode last night, this is scary xD
These have been a constant for years on Aliexpress; my favorite is "Western Original" - they copy Western Digital. They do both NVMe & SSD drives.
btw, if someone said it is a scam, they might just say "4TB" is a product name not capacity of a product
thinking that the act of drinking is an important personality trait is kind of annoying and not relevant at all, but your content is good so here I am.
Even though I'm a Brit and can't get half the beers you taste, I do like your beer reviews
The problem with Aliexpress is they side with the seller in such cases. Hard to get your money back. Now often they use free return and that is the only option you can choose. So no more refund/partial refund.
That means u make purchases wrong way, use some card with wallet in (IRC Paypal have own card) u open dispute with seller and go to your card provider for CHARGEBACK procedure to be launched, That's make even playfiled Seller and AE vs You and one of big 4 (Visa/MC/etc)
I'm curious to know the real capacity of the drive. Please write a poweshell script to dump some data and calculate shasums to see when some bits flip
Comically large drive has entered the chat.
The first red flag right there should have been the price. It's too good to obviously be true.
You get what you pay for. I've learned this the hard way so many times. I am to the point in life where I would rather spent more money up front from a brand I know and has a good reputation behind their products. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The easiest way to catch this. Move one large video file. Right click and select copy. Put it in a folder. Right click folder to cooy into another. And repeat untill full. It doubles every time.
Seen those, realised they are fake within 2 seconds, so it's very hard to understand anyone falling for it, it's like people who fill a hard drive with bit coin and then allow the situation where it gets thrown in the bin😮
I think that if u format it on linux it will show how much capacity it has instantly
I've seen "8TB" drives for 3€. I frigging wish. 😂😂
They laser etched the info away so Garak wouldn't ensure they had an unfortunate end! ;)
No vlo tools, no h2testw, at least hoped for the latter one.
In recent years I have gotten some of these that were not really all that huge for just a little better than competitive prices. So like if average price is like $40 for something you might see it come in at like $38. Then when you check the reviews you see artifacts of AI
I've got one of those! 2T, $30 on eBay. Got my money back and about 200GB of crappy storage.
That beer would be disgusting btw 🤣
4TB for $35 - Wow ! ..... So far purchased 5 64GB USB thumb drives , and I verified all for capacity . Win some lose some . Don't forget to look for hidden partitions !
you can get cheapish 4tb ssds usually from oem pulls . but still wont be 30 bucks . more like 90 to 100osh
Fun fact, Ireland doesn't actually have postal codes, so that company address is actually accurate!
Fun fact Ireland *DOES* have postal codes. They were introduced in 2014 and are known as Eircode. Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system.
Since the drive was already formatted, is there a security risk there ? (Something like an USB worm)
A drive should definitely not have any data on it (including a file system) upon first install. I'd be concerned.
UK and Irish PO box numbers don't need a post code (zip code as you americans call it). The number and town is enought to identify it as a single box.
I use the Victoria drive tool, it seems to be able to read? only to the available physical nand on it's sector sweep.
I've met these scammers they are still a thing, approached me at the shops two guys with a white van and gave me the whole sales pitch.