🚨UPDATE: Part 2 is here! th-cam.com/video/UjVvlaCGGhA/w-d-xo.html - sorry it took a while… I'll explain everything. Enjoy the new episode! I will do a PART 2 so subscribe and stay tuned! 🔔 More developments happened since I finished this episode. 👀
Hey, thanks for the shoutout! Yeah, the first time I dismantled one of these, I destroyed it beyond recognition! I love your anti-scam content best of all. I'm going to link here from my video, because some people wanted to see some in-depth capacity/bandwidth testing that I didn't bother with in the recent video.
Thank you for the plug! And yeah… I just saw that scam account popping up earlier today. Guess I'll have to report it again. I love getting scam comments on scam-busting videos 🤣
@@ComputerClan Yeah he tried to run his game on me but your filter withdrew the comment before I could blast it for being a bastard. My response would have been something along the line of "$@#! off !@&#$"
I bought one of the “128gb” flash drives from Amazon just for fun and checked it out on a test bed. It was a whopping 512mb! We have a fiber laser so I corrected the capacity and sent it back to Amazon :)
You can replicate this rectification of the capacity issue with careful application of a lighter, for those of you that are too boring to own fiber lasers
@@dannydaw59 If it wasn't commingled stock and they can be sure which seller's inventory that unit came from, _maybe_ they will. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Here's another scam I found - this time on Amazon. A low priced SSD drive turned out to be just the carrier ! The advert said it had 8TB storage, but the box when it arrived said it was just a container - and it was indeed an empty case.
Yup. It's almost cheaper to buy those portable SSD's that have their own case. You open the case up, take out the SSD, and then return the empty SSD case. It's f'd.
@@joesteadman343 A favourite tactic of scammers on Wish is to advertise a hard drive of large capacity and all you get is an enclosure when it finally arrives😆😆
@@FormerRuling I remember the first time I saw one of these was way back around 2010 it was a 2.5in 250GB drive that when opened up was literally just a A to Micro USB adapter with a 512MB thumb drive stuck on and two large bolts glued into the case to give it the weight of a real mechanical HDD all hot glued together inside an otherwise empty enclosure. Worst part was having to tell the customer the data they transferred onto it was gone and it was impossible to recover
I bought one of these on Amazon last week. It was a 2TB model that was priced only a little less than a legit drive. It was the same 64GB chip inside. FYI the drive looked identical to yours in this video, but was a different brand.
@@LordLab Yes. Fortunately Amazon is easy to return items. I tried not to call them out in the return request. If they were going to sell such a blatant scam, I dis not want them attempting to make an issue about the return.
@@robbates4704 The problem isn't Amazon per se, it's the Amazon marketplace vendors that work through them. You buy something on Amazon, but the real seller is some shady box pusher out of China. Amazon may handle the warehousing and shipping, but they don't control the product. ALWAYS check the actual vendor when buying through Amazon, if it's some 3rd party where the company details are clearly random generated nonsense based out of China, don't buy.
I just bought one of these with the same issue, why don’t we go after the people manufacturing and selling stuff like this? They need to be taught a lesson.
We do, and have done so for a long time, and that's the problem. It's a waste of time. Someone else will simply take their place. "teaching someone a lesson" has *NEVER* led to actually solving a problem. That's why, even though we used to sentence people to death, and still lock them up for life. We still have to deal with things like rape and murder. (we are certifiably retarded when it comes to solving human made issues) Humanity is a pile of garbage, if we don't collectively clean ourselves as a species, there will never be an end to these kinds of problems for as long as we continue to make babies. 😑 Have fun participating in that revolving door of self-satisfaction. 🤡
because they are chinese. the international comunity refuses to properly saction china por the crap they pull, be it their constant steal of intellectual propertly and manufacture of cheap clones, or their consentration camps for muslims and the fact they started a global pandemic and spent months trying to hide the outbreak.
1:46 What immediately hit my eye about that selection: the smallest size is 500 _Go_ - gigaoctet. Why is an (allegedly) English company using the French term for gigabyte, only to then move on with (English) terabyte?
@@johndododoe1411 The english world never uses octet. B stands for byte, as in 80 B, 1 KB, 55 MB. b stands for bit. The symbol for Bel is also B, so that is where it gets confusing. I have seen some write it as Bm.
@@louistournas120 Unfortunately, the people who introduced the MebiByte unit decided to use lower case b for byte, not bit, completely messing up industry notations.
Unfortunately, I got scammed by this fake things (but an USB drive, not an SSD drive), and it was apparently 128 gigs, until I used the drive for Android ROM backups, until all the recovery logs hangs at around 8,000 megs made me realise that the damn drive is just 8 gigs, realised this too late for a refund sadly :(
Unless "Amazon" is listed as the seller, you are not buying from Amazon but from a random seller. Also, these scams are getting more sophisticated: Some hacked firmwares have a thing where the new blocks replace the old ones when the actual capacity has been exhausted, so it might be months before a user realises the scam, so be aware.
I nearly choked on my Sunday morning coffee when you compared your skills to Linus. 🤣😂🙂 Remember back in the day (nearly 20 years ago) when it started with SD cards? I was extremely lucky to get an 8Gb card for a really cheap price and confirmed it with the H2testw program as a genuine 8Gb. After that the majority of the cards I got had immediate refunds given when I said they were fake. Even Amazon gave me immediate refunds. So always use the H2testw on new media to confirm the storage capacity.
My grandpa got two of these (the only difference being that they were marked as 4TB) KNOWING it was a scam, only going through with buying it because it claimed to be on sale. I recently opened one of them up to find a (surprisingly fully functional) 64GB Micro SD card.
it would be funny if it was an 8 tb mechanical hard drive marketed as an ssd but then it would be less of a scam because atleast then you get 8 tb capacity
I saw a Facebook ad around the holidays and... fell for it. I got the drives (I bought two "4TB" devices), connected them to my PC, then popped them into my laptop bag and forgot about them -- until I came across your video. I popped of the ends and found what you did, a tiny PCB held in place with hot glue the had a USB interface/controller, and EEPROM, and a microSD socket with a 60GB microSD card. BTW, with the ends off, I popped the device into a heavy-duty plastic back and dropped that into a cup of boiling water. After a few minutes the PCB slid out. I cleaned off the hot glue and it still works. I will be taking it to DEF CON as a show-and-tell.
I feel glad that you're spreading awareness of these fake hard drives. I knew these were too good to be true and luckily I bought one dirt cheap at a flea market so it didn't hurt me when I found out for myself the thing is a faulty scam. These things are a waste of plastic, metal, and electronic components. They shouldn't even be made and sold in the first place
I tested one of these types of scam drives. It was a 2TB “SSD”, with 200gb of actual capacity and 4MBps write speed. An IDE drive from 1997 is faster than that.
@@onnowesterman4825 so they were to lazy to at least make it lie to you that it could hold 2 tb sounds like you got lucky that time as it at least works better and more reliably then one that thinks it has 2tb of capacity
I kept seeing these on Facebook a while back. I tried to warn people in the comments as often as possible. Couldn’t believe FB even allowed this scam to exist on their platform.
Have you not noticed the far right comments all over that festering site? And the fact you get banned for calling them what they are "stupid" Time to let facebook go.
@@troy3456789 They don't care as long as they pay them. I reported scams and they were several weeks after that still active. On the other side.. nipples get deleted within hours.
Thanks for what you're doing. Some of your commenters even open my eyes to situations I would have never thought of. But always remember: Just because you're paranoid does not mean that they're not out to get you!
1TB SSD storage is currently available for about 75€ at best. So it was clear to me from the beginning that this is a scam. Edit: The vendor has since adjusted the prices!
One thing I have noticed with fake countdown timers is not only do they have a countdown timer for the sale but also for stock levels as in the UK here there is a legitimate company called B&Q which is basically The Home Depot of the UK and sells hardware and tools and so on and my uncle received an email from a random website claiming to be them saying that he could claim a free barbeque worth £200 and in the email it said that there were 5000 units being given but every time you click the link it says 250 units remain and the number goes down quick until it gets to like 150 and then would go super slow and stop at like 100 making people believe that there was still stock and the URL had nothing to do with B&Q. My uncle was ever so slightly suspicious but since he is tech illiterate like many older people he messaged me with a link to the site to verify if it was legit I told him it's fake and that the website has nothing to do with B&Q
February 2021, I bought a case from Wish that was advertised as 8 TB for little money. When I tested it on my Windows-10 PC, it presented itself as 4 times 2 TB flat. There was no way I could initialise them into one drive of 8 TB. The files that I stored onto it did not properly work (sometimes they seemed to be okay, but not really). So, I opened the case and found a PCB with a small USB-hub. Four USB-sticks were attached to the hub. I detached them and tried them on my PC, as I would use any arbitrary USB-stick. I initalised them as FAT32 drives. After that, they appear to work as 2 TB drives quite nicely. No more hickups whatsoever. So, the only scam that the vendor pulled on me (and probably many others as well) is to present an "SSD" USB-drive that was actually a set of four USB-sticks. But for that price, I believe it is fine. I have 8 TB of stick volume available for about 35 euros. And I still got a pristine SSD USB-case lying in my stash, ready to be used for any project that may come along.
@@channelname9843 That app did not show me any issue (yet) with my 2 TB sticks. As far as I believe I get the message, people experienced the 32 GB limit in cases where 2 TB was advertised by the scam vendor. I am copying a large set of files now onto one of my 2 TB sticks to test whether it will bump against that limit, but until now, it is doing well, having exceeded 37 GB, and still going strong. Perhaps the stumble will follow at some later point, I don't know yet, but let's just wait and see. EDIT: There is now about 57 GB on this stick after which I stopped the copying session to see how thing are now. The video files are still working, so I can't detect any flaw in this. No 32 GB limit for me, so it seems. Could it really be that these 4 sticks of mine are actually 2 TB each?
As someone who worked in departments where I was exposed to this kind of thing, you got one thing wrong. You cannot use the prices that products are sold to consumers as a base for how much they cost the companies who sell them or their actual base cost. Although I'm sure the price scale is different, most companies pay WAY, WAY less for the things they then sell than what's listed as the sale price. An example is a leather bomber jacket I eventually bought from one job. The jacket was on the shelf for $300, but had been discontinued and returned to the manufacturer. The one remaining jacket had been overlooked, and I found it in the warehouse. The store that was selling it had only paid about $60 for the jacket; since I worked in their returns department, I was able to see the price it was originally purchased as. With my employee discount, I was allowed to buy this supposedly $300 jacket for $50. Very often, stores will jack up the prices to make a profit. The more rare, difficult to obtain or desirable a product, the more extreme the increase. SSDs are extremely in demand, and so most companies will jack up the price to make as much of a profit as possible. If consumers could see how much those same products cost the company that is selling them to purchase in order to sell, or how much it costs to manufacture one, they would be upset.
This reminds me of when I bought a portable fan if I remember right and the idiot that made the manual misspelled "could" like they've never learned past tense before.
I'm so glad you have done this review because I have been caught out several times by buying SSD's and micro SD cards that do not have anywhere near the capacity they claim to have. Amazon and eBay should be doing more to ban the sellers of these bogus products.
The most suspicious ones of all claim to be „Made in Britain”. 😳 But given the reputation of our fire extinguishers, that could just as easily be a suttle warning as well… 🇬🇧🧯🔥🙃
I got conned by a seller in Sydney Australia. Claiming 2Tb SSD portable drives. Failed first time I used so pulled it apart and found 2x64Mb thumb drives inside. Seller disappeared off eBay but fortunately eBay refunded my $$
Your sarcasm is coming to life and dripping off my phone screen onto my hand! Weird things have been showing up on my hand now, and I wonder if that means your videos are 'growing on me'! 🤭 I've been enjoying your shows, and have oft wondered "That shit can't work!" Thanks for validating my presumptions! 👍
Haha, when I saw the title and thumbnail of this video, the first thought going throuh my head was: "let's see how much hot glue YOU will find in this..." :) Seems like there are various schools regarding these fake SSD-s and the main difference is how much glue they use :)
7:53 That's why you disable the auto-updates in Windows if you haven't for some reason. If there's an urgent update, it'll notify you, otherwise it'll update on the next manual restart (and you can still choose to restart without updating if you want).
you actually cant always restart without updating, my hp pavillion (good gaming laptop) forced an update for windows 10 and refused to let me restart or turn it off unless i updated it. Yes i couldve just let it die, but then itd still force an update, and not ever turning it off is really unhealthy for a laptop and its components
A few years ago, I got a few USB Flash drives that were 128GB on eBay, at around the same price of 16GB USB Flash Drives at the time. When I copied video files and starting playing them back, ones past a certain point in the folder will not play back. Discovered they did that trick of telling the OS that the drive is bigger than it is.
A 1TB SSD, whether internal or external, from a reputable manufacturer (e.g., Western Digital/SanDisk, Crucial, Samsung, Seagate, etc.) should cost around $100 to $150, depending on the brand, speed and interface, from a reputable reseller.
You didn't think I knew about one of the most famous tech TH-camrs in the world? I kid, but of course I do. LTT used one of my meme templates, so that's my recent "claim to fame" haha.
I bought 2 similar 8 TB drives on eBay. My intention was to use them for my Plex Media Server. Upon delivery, one drive was 8 TB and one was only 4 TB. I tried transferring a few movie files onto one of the drives. The data transfer speeds were atrocious, about 15 Mb per second. I got my money back and will never touch cheap SSD's again.
do they actually technically claim it's 5Gb/s anywhere? AFAIK since newer USB specs also include the features from all previous revisions, even a 1.5Mb/s keyboard can be considered perfectly USB 3.2 compliant.
??? no it doesn't. USB 1.0 is compatible with, but not compliant with USB 3.2. To be compliant it has to support ALL features in the spec, not only a small subset
Well some things never change. I learned this when the Ipod was a thing and ordered some cheap knock off from China on Ebay. All files got corrupted when exceeding 1/8 of the promised capacitity ( I guess it was promising 8GB ). Reformating showed the true capacity. So I refunded it and got my money back and some excuse about the differences between bits and bytes. Total BS because then it would have shown the true capacity before I formatted it. I said I would write a bad review if I didn't get my money back and he chose to play it safe, just to make potential new victims along the road. These things kept on selling for a while and also kept on evolving over time to this day when you see things like these ssd's. So buying this from a website like this also probably means you have lost your money forgood
And this is why I only use known brands from a trusted retailer I've been using for nearly 20 years, respectable prices too. I never use places like Amazon or Wish etc for any electronics.
When talking about the price, you forgot about one thing: manufacturer and seller margins. And for electronics they are HUGE. I have seen electronics that cost $500 as a whole and if you buy all the parts in them and assemble + program it yourself it would cost just $50 or even less. This is especially true if a device is copyright/patent protected, since the monopoly caused by copyrights allow even bigger margins.
I once had an uncle who wanted to get some videos from me so I suggested he mail me a 1tb external drive. Instead, he sent me a 2TB Flash Drive. I warned him these were scams but he thought since it was from amazon they were legit. I used hwtest and lo and behold, it was a 32GB drive. He sent me a proper external hard drive after that.
4:15 - You can't get 8 TB of storage in *ANY* media for $99. Even a used slow 5400 RPM datacenter spinning-rust 3.5" hard drive on eBay is more than that. (When bought from a reputable seller of used verified-good IT parts. Sure, you can probably find it cheaper from a dodgy source.)
If the storage device isn't a Samsung, Sony, Western Digital, or Sandisk then it's an iffy device. But generally if it's not made by a well known highly trusted company then you're probably going to get scammed with a fake/faulty unit.
A company I worked for got scammed when purchasing flash memory chips. My company tried using a new distributer with a dubious reputation, so our company made a small "test" purchase, and they sent us good chips. Satisfied with that order, our company made a larger order... and the whole lot were fakes; they were "rebranded" as bigger capacity parts. These fake parts went into inventory, and when the time came around to use them months later, past the return date... and we were holding the bag of bad parts and had to panic order the parts at a much higher price. Needless to say, we had a BIG problem with SMALL capacity.
Very timely reminder that things that seem to good to be true probably are. BTW ... it is a shame that h2testw doesn’t have a mode to check files as it goes along rather than during the second phase.
It's doing the check at the end for good reasons. Lots of fake drives work in a loop, after you wrote X data (and fill its actual capacity) it will start again from the beginning of the drive (and overwrite anything else you wrote before). If you don't check at the end when ALL data has been written, this looping trick will fool it.
@@marcogenovesi8570 ... I’m not saying it couldn’t also check for consistency at the end, but having to run a 2 day test before finding out the drive is only a couple of gig isn’t exactly optimal use of resources.
@@CTCTraining1 The issue is that you can't figure out the real capacity just by reading in the first pass without already knowing how big it is. Like if you read right after the first 1gig file done written, it'll just pass unless the drive is actually smaller than 1gig. At the end,you still need to wait until 2nd read pass to know that it's actually looping. However, it's possible that you can read after 1/2/4/8/16/32/64... gigs written, should be faster than just read after written the whole drive.
FakeFlashTest.exe may be faster. It just writes blocks at intervals over the whole memory and reads back at various stages. AFAIK it has only been tested on devices up to 2TB though...
So that is what happened.... I got snookered into buying a few and did not have a clue why they did not work properly... Contacted the seller and got confusing answers. Just tossed them in the drawer and forgot about them until seeing your video. Thanks for filling me in on what happened...
No Windows didn't restart during that test, MacOS restarted during BOTH of your BMD tests! Thank YOU, APPLE! It's not like I have anything better to do with MY life!
I bought one of these devices (not from the same company, but from Amazon). I got the 4TB model (USB 3.1), and as Ken said (and I quote) "The speeds are absolute crap!" I use the drive as a backup, and store some video files on it as well, yet the files won't run and I actually have to move it to my own device's storage.
Thank you for covering this problem. Many non computer savvy people will buy it because it was sold at a cheap price compared to all the original hardware. Then, added with lots of online shopping platform doesn't take down these people for selling fake items quick enough. Thirdly, the fake 5 stars comment usually cover up the 1 star which states the lies and manipulation of the fact that those items are fake.
To be honest there's a lot of USB 2.0 pen drives that are just a SD card in a trenchcoat^W adapter. But those are usually a lot less scammy than this. I remember some ~6 years ago a number of SATA "SSDs" that were actually weighted down to "feel" they had an actual boards inside.
Hey Ken, i think on that last part of the video (11:52) you were wrong, that chip should be the translator that converts MicroSD to USB and that the shaddy firmware was on the MicroSD itself because you can also buy fake capacity SD carts and also since it's usb a chip like tat would be required.BTW Love the Scam Tech Series and i am excited for the Second Part. Cheers
The price is low on purpose, so the cost of doing anything about a claim out ways the purchase cost. There have been loads of these scams going back years. I bought a 1tb HDD and found out it was 2TB but was portioned to only show 1TB as the other 1TB was corrupt with damaged clusters!
you know, you can set windows 10 to NOT update when connected to a metered connection, and then set your current connection as metered. This way, windows will never update.
@@marcogenovesi8570 You the guy that clicks random ads and links from your e-mail or the places you go to on the internet? Maybe that guy who likes to download things and keeps getting baited by fake "download now" buttons? I'm sure he can afford another PC that is dedicated for testing. And that testing PC doesn't need to be "always up to date", unless that's what they're testing for.
@@grenzviel4480 updates don't stop phishing (if you double click and give admin access, then it has admin access) so what are you talking about here? Updates protect from automated malware.
@@marcogenovesi8570 that's precisely why updates are not really needed on testing PCs (unless needed for a test), because they're supposed to be for testing purpose only. If you didn't get it, you're not supposed to log-in with your own personal accounts on testing computers. Seriously, you cannot get phished if no one is logged in. Even if "hackers" gain remote access to that PC, it shouldn't have anything valuable because it's only for testing purposes. Hell, I wonder why it even had internet connection to update when he tested the SSD.
This same item is all over Amazon as well - Disgusting. And even worse, if you look at all the reviews, they appear that a human didn't even enter them (bots?), with comments saying "The drive tastes good" and such. Just to get the 5 stars. If you look at the reviews farther down you then see the one start "real" victims that got scammed. And yes, me being tech savvy, I know NVME drives are not cheap. They DO have 8 TB ones, even 16 TB, but they are THOUSANDS of dollars. Glad you opened it up and showed that it's anything but an M2 drive in there. I feel sad thinking how many people fall for this. Very screwed up scam.
@@troy3456789 ah, you didn't fully understand my original comment, got it! I meant this thing has an apparently purposefully designed and fabricated PCB inside of it instead of using off the shelf USB adapters and a fake capacity USB stick hot glued into a case. Hope that clears things up.
@@donotatme This is your original comment: "Bit surprising that there's an actual PCB inside instead of a USB drive hot glued to an USB adapter". It means that you're surprised or shocked that there was a pcb inside, right? Welp, it turns out in order to fool the computer into believing it holds more than it does, it needs to have a place to mount the chip that lies to the computer. No PCB? it would report its actual capacity. I hope this helps.
Been there. $12 10TB "SSD" "flash drive". Turned out to be a dual micro-sd card reader, which fortunately is somewhat useful to me anyway, but only USB-1 interface, so garbage. Got it from eBay if I recall correctly, didn't bother pursuing it due to the very low price. To top that off, no way to insert/extract sd cards, as the board was hot glued in with enough hot glue to connect a towrope to a truck (OK, exaggeration). The single micro sd in it read as 14TB, but it was actually 8GB if I remember right. Yes, it's possible and pretty easy to edit drive info to misreport it. Do your research, I didn't! Incidentally, before destroyed, yours was a dual micro sd reader also, almost identical, enclosure and all, to the one I got. Small world. Great content, Ken!
That moment when a m.2 SSD is claimed to be "fast", but gets beaten by a lowly QLC SATA SSD (practical speeds I.E. slightly above that claimed 500MB/s)...
Yup, I got scammed into this exact model. Oh how gullible was I to believe that I'd be able to back up 16TB worth with the price of 1TB. Like you showed, all movie files are corrupted and my working files were not loading! A penny wise a pound foolish.
I've seen phone on legit shopping websites that have 8gb ram and 512gb storage, for just $99... Yeah it was a fake I knew it. But the thing is about 99% of the thousands of ratings are positive!! So I don't know if they buyers aren't just tech savvy enough or what. I've also recently watch a guy on TH-cam purchasing similar device and the actual capacity is 1gb ram 8gb storage. And android 12 is actually like Android kit kat. So yeah.
I bought what was said to be a Samsung 960 Pro drive from Best Buy Online, but when I tried to clone my existing drive onto it, it mysteriously threw an "Unexpected error" at almost exactly 1/8 of the claimed 1 TB capacity and was never writable again. Fortunately they accepted it back without raising a fuss, but even the bigger chains are getting hit by these. I then realized I still have PCIe Gen 2, so I opted for a much cheaper WD Blue that still saturates the four lanes available to it.
Sadly there have been a few cases where actual retailers have ended up with contaminated supplies (which is the reason why i now try to buy only from the manufacturer wherever possible)
the case of drive was used for shonky electronic lighters in 70=80s. lately im seeing the cases used for shonky chargers, vspe inhalers and sata drives
5:35 yo don't diss Linus. He might drop $h!t a lot, but like you, he knows what he's talking about. Plus, he's in the 10's of millions of subs across his 8 channels (me being 6 of them, I follow 6 of them on youtube don't @ me)
You keep appearing in my feed, I’m trying to do delicate research, and I get caught in these videos. they’re just so entertaining please stop appearing on my suggested feed 😅😂
I had to buy a 256gb flash drive about a month ago, and my gf said "just buy one" after I was taking 3 days to find the exact one for a good price I wanted... I tried explaining this issue and she was shocked 😲😳
I stay away from Flash type storage if I need to store a ton of family vids and photos or e-docs, long term, like in my safe. The problem (yes I've experienced it first-hand approx 10yrs ago) with Flash type storage (i.e. thumb-drives and sdcards) is, it relies on DC power from your device to magnetically charge and hold all those millions of tiny transistors/switches in their set "On or Off" positions. Now don't panic. All of them, no matter which brand, will retain their internal magnetic hold reliably for several weeks if you need to take it out of your device. But take heed, if your Thumbdrives/SDcards sit unpowered for too long, thousands of those tiny transistors/switches will slowly start losing their magnetic hold and will drift out of their set positions. If enough of them in each of your saved files drift far enough out of position, the next time it receives power from your device, they will be sent to the opposite position, corrupting those files permanently. Over 900 out of the 10k pics/vids, stored on three thumbdrives and two MicroSD cards were corrupted and those drives were a mix of three different brands (Sandisk, Samsung and PNY. Since then, I only store my files long-term, on my Seagate portable external drives that have the good ol' reliable 2.5in SATA's in their protective cases. Heck I don't even trust the two small portable Samsung T5 SSD's (1TB each), that I carry around. I only use them because their read/write speeds are so damn fast.
Honestly, anyone buying no-name/off-brand/Chinesium tat, at a tiny fraction of the price of genuine storage devices, deserves everything they get! Ok, bit harsh, not everyone is tech-savvy, but trusting data to ANYTHING that isn't from a proper brand is NUTS! I "give away" several flash drives every day to my clients, and could save hundreds of dollars every month by buying cheap flash drives, but it's just not worth the aggro. Lexar, SanDisk, Samsung...these are pretty much the only USB flash drives I trust. This really is one area in which brand-name products are TOTALLY worth the extra $$!
Something that should be noted: those drives that are actually SD card readers can be VERY dangerous. Because at heart it’s just reader being reported as an SSD, it’s very easy for the SD card to be swapped for something containing malicious hardware which can be done in bulk. (Something that’s much harder to do on a fake ssd without as card)
The best part of these fake hard drive scambusting videos is when the enclosures are broken up and we see the hodgepodge of electronic components soldered and glued onto a cheap board.
I saw an ad just now for a scam claiming to be a new inovative mosquito killing device called BuzzBGone or something along the lines of that. It had the typical ad where it claimed a made up engineer created a new technology that uses a specific type of uv light to attract and kill bugs more effectively and even claimed it was test to be 8 times more effective than other mosquito traps. Although when I looked it up I couldn’t find the ad again
Back in the old day and before online shopping, people were selling 25GB of hard drive in black market or street market when the hard drive was actually 5GB. History repeats again for SSD.
🚨UPDATE: Part 2 is here! th-cam.com/video/UjVvlaCGGhA/w-d-xo.html - sorry it took a while… I'll explain everything.
Enjoy the new episode! I will do a PART 2 so subscribe and stay tuned! 🔔 More developments happened since I finished this episode. 👀
Nobody cares about linode so stop it okay.
@@cpyt lmao it’s just a sponsor
I saw this same product for sale on Amazon yesterday, I went back to link it to you today for a follow-up but it appears to have been pulled.
@@cpyt I take it you have no idea how TH-cam advertising/sponsorship works.
How?? That SSD is *not* coming back, llmao.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout! Yeah, the first time I dismantled one of these, I destroyed it beyond recognition!
I love your anti-scam content best of all. I'm going to link here from my video, because some people wanted to see some in-depth capacity/bandwidth testing that I didn't bother with in the recent video.
Thank you for the plug! And yeah… I just saw that scam account popping up earlier today. Guess I'll have to report it again. I love getting scam comments on scam-busting videos 🤣
immediately thought of atomic shrimp when i saw this
didnt expect him to actually be here lmao
I was about to mention your name but here you are.
@@ComputerClan Yeah he tried to run his game on me but your filter withdrew the comment before I could blast it for being a bastard. My response would have been something along the line of "$@#! off !@&#$"
The barrister known as John Warrosa is selling ssds now?
I bought one of the “128gb” flash drives from Amazon just for fun and checked it out on a test bed. It was a whopping 512mb! We have a fiber laser so I corrected the capacity and sent it back to Amazon :)
Nice work!
You can replicate this rectification of the capacity issue with careful application of a lighter, for those of you that are too boring to own fiber lasers
On the bright side it (probably) wasn't a Rubber Ducky key
Hopefully Amazon will kick that seller off the marketplace.
@@dannydaw59 If it wasn't commingled stock and they can be sure which seller's inventory that unit came from, _maybe_ they will. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Here's another scam I found - this time on Amazon. A low priced SSD drive turned out to be just the carrier ! The advert said it had 8TB storage, but the box when it arrived said it was just a container - and it was indeed an empty case.
Look at 4:52 in this vid. The box is for an enclosure. They just slapped an 8TB sticker on an enclosure box.
Yup. It's almost cheaper to buy those portable SSD's that have their own case. You open the case up, take out the SSD, and then return the empty SSD case.
It's f'd.
@@joesteadman343 A favourite tactic of scammers on Wish is to advertise a hard drive of large capacity and all you get is an enclosure when it finally arrives😆😆
they are getting lazy if they didn't even bother gluing in the little .50c board and SD card lol.
@@FormerRuling I remember the first time I saw one of these was way back around 2010 it was a 2.5in 250GB drive that when opened up was literally just a A to Micro USB adapter with a 512MB thumb drive stuck on and two large bolts glued into the case to give it the weight of a real mechanical HDD all hot glued together inside an otherwise empty enclosure. Worst part was having to tell the customer the data they transferred onto it was gone and it was impossible to recover
naming the D: drive "shewantsthe" is genius
oh i just realized lol
its at 7:39 if anyone's wondering
I also named my drives DoUSuck(D:) as a reference to the movie ever since 💀
I bought one of these on Amazon last week. It was a 2TB model that was priced only a little less than a legit drive. It was the same 64GB chip inside. FYI the drive looked identical to yours in this video, but was a different brand.
got $ back from Amazon ?
@@LordLab Yes. Fortunately Amazon is easy to return items. I tried not to call them out in the return request. If they were going to sell such a blatant scam, I dis not want them attempting to make an issue about the return.
@@robbates4704
I only buy these stuff from the company. Don't always trust amazon sellers.
@@robbates4704 The problem isn't Amazon per se, it's the Amazon marketplace vendors that work through them.
You buy something on Amazon, but the real seller is some shady box pusher out of China. Amazon may handle the warehousing and shipping, but they don't control the product.
ALWAYS check the actual vendor when buying through Amazon, if it's some 3rd party where the company details are clearly random generated nonsense based out of China, don't buy.
@@namaloompakistani1768 Amen.
I just bought one of these with the same issue, why don’t we go after the people manufacturing and selling stuff like this? They need to be taught a lesson.
We do, and have done so for a long time, and that's the problem. It's a waste of time. Someone else will simply take their place. "teaching someone a lesson" has *NEVER* led to actually solving a problem.
That's why, even though we used to sentence people to death, and still lock them up for life. We still have to deal with things like rape and murder. (we are certifiably retarded when it comes to solving human made issues)
Humanity is a pile of garbage, if we don't collectively clean ourselves as a species, there will never be an end to these kinds of problems for as long as we continue to make babies. 😑
Have fun participating in that revolving door of self-satisfaction. 🤡
because they are chinese. the international comunity refuses to properly saction china por the crap they pull, be it their constant steal of intellectual propertly and manufacture of cheap clones, or their consentration camps for muslims and the fact they started a global pandemic and spent months trying to hide the outbreak.
Because most of these manufacturers are in China,gl suing them
that is why i dont by parts like that an 8t drive for 79.99 yea hell nah mate
@@ducmhng why cant we sue China ? they do this fake things often right ? why scamming people, it is BAD right ?
1:46 What immediately hit my eye about that selection: the smallest size is 500 _Go_ - gigaoctet. Why is an (allegedly) English company using the French term for gigabyte, only to then move on with (English) terabyte?
octet is also the word used in formal international standards, because it's damned confusing to check if the "b" on a label is bits, Bytes or Bels.
It's a subtle hint that you should Go away from this product
@@johndododoe1411 The english world never uses octet. B stands for byte, as in 80 B, 1 KB, 55 MB.
b stands for bit.
The symbol for Bel is also B, so that is where it gets confusing. I have seen some write it as Bm.
@@louistournas120 Unfortunately, the people who introduced the MebiByte unit decided to use lower case b for byte, not bit, completely messing up industry notations.
@@louistournas120 Bm means something totally different than B in the case of (deci)Bels.
Unfortunately, I got scammed by this fake things (but an USB drive, not an SSD drive), and it was apparently 128 gigs, until I used the drive for Android ROM backups, until all the recovery logs hangs at around 8,000 megs made me realise that the damn drive is just 8 gigs, realised this too late for a refund sadly :(
You can reflash the USB drive to use as normal 8GB memory.
@@Prowindows62 how do you even do that? lmao
@@raine_tay USB drives should cost about $0.10 per GB or it's likely not legit, same with sd cards
What you mean with too late? If it is scam, you can bring it back whenever you want.
@@fourdoorsmorehoes in my country sd cards are usually around $0.2 per GB
I saw a lot of this kind of thing on eBay recently and knew it had to be fake, but wondered how it all worked. You filled in the gap, thank you!
just don't fall or shake your body🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Been going on on eBay for a very long time (decades).
These are even on Amazon, they're everywhere now. I've also seen these as pendrives soldered to USB B/C ports.
Unless "Amazon" is listed as the seller, you are not buying from Amazon but from a random seller. Also, these scams are getting more sophisticated: Some hacked firmwares have a thing where the new blocks replace the old ones when the actual capacity has been exhausted, so it might be months before a user realises the scam, so be aware.
I nearly choked on my Sunday morning coffee when you compared your skills to Linus. 🤣😂🙂
Remember back in the day (nearly 20 years ago) when it started with SD cards? I was extremely lucky to get an 8Gb card for a really cheap price and confirmed it with the H2testw program as a genuine 8Gb. After that the majority of the cards I got had immediate refunds given when I said they were fake. Even Amazon gave me immediate refunds. So always use the H2testw on new media to confirm the storage capacity.
My grandpa got two of these (the only difference being that they were marked as 4TB) KNOWING it was a scam, only going through with buying it because it claimed to be on sale. I recently opened one of them up to find a (surprisingly fully functional) 64GB Micro SD card.
it would be funny if it was an 8 tb mechanical hard drive marketed as an ssd but then it would be less of a scam because atleast then you get 8 tb capacity
I saw a Facebook ad around the holidays and... fell for it. I got the drives (I bought two "4TB" devices), connected them to my PC, then popped them into my laptop bag and forgot about them -- until I came across your video. I popped of the ends and found what you did, a tiny PCB held in place with hot glue the had a USB interface/controller, and EEPROM, and a microSD socket with a 60GB microSD card. BTW, with the ends off, I popped the device into a heavy-duty plastic back and dropped that into a cup of boiling water. After a few minutes the PCB slid out. I cleaned off the hot glue and it still works. I will be taking it to DEF CON as a show-and-tell.
isn't it amazing how 'fact checkers' can check comments and posts but they can't even check the fake content they sell and advertise.
Lenode has your back boy
I feel glad that you're spreading awareness of these fake hard drives. I knew these were too good to be true and luckily I bought one dirt cheap at a flea market so it didn't hurt me when I found out for myself the thing is a faulty scam. These things are a waste of plastic, metal, and electronic components. They shouldn't even be made and sold in the first place
Lol. You bought one at a flea market and actually expected it to work? Omfg! Ignorance must be bliss!
I tested one of these types of scam drives. It was a 2TB “SSD”, with 200gb of actual capacity and 4MBps write speed. An IDE drive from 1997 is faster than that.
well that's cause it was a micro sd card 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 they are slower then your granny
rubrics combine harvest ,once up en ati mez...
Oh wow 200gb well that is much I had a 2tb 'ssd' and it says on a scan program 16gb..
@@onnowesterman4825 so they were to lazy to at least make it lie to you that it could hold 2 tb sounds like you got lucky that time as it at least works better and more reliably then one that thinks it has 2tb of capacity
I kept seeing these on Facebook a while back. I tried to warn people in the comments as often as possible. Couldn’t believe FB even allowed this scam to exist on their platform.
You couldn't believe Faecesbook would advertise scams? Adorable!
Where have you been _since 2007?_
Have you not noticed the far right comments all over that festering site? And the fact you get banned for calling them what they are "stupid" Time to let facebook go.
Facebook marketplace at least allow you to report the scam seller.
Facebook gets money for scam ads, so they don't care.
@@troy3456789 They don't care as long as they pay them. I reported scams and they were several weeks after that still active. On the other side.. nipples get deleted within hours.
Also you should make a virtual machine with usb pass through to test these drives no telling how much spyware is silently installed on the rom chip
No dancing allowed lmao
@@MrREDSTAR20 what
@@NepgearGM6.1 No dancing allowed what's so hard to understand?
@@andresponce-vazquez9158 because they make no sense talking of computers and then saying no dancing allowed
@@NepgearGM6.1 That was obviously a warning not to jiggle the lousy plug. Badly translated from Chinese of cause.
Thanks for what you're doing. Some of your commenters even open my eyes to situations I would have never thought of. But always remember:
Just because you're paranoid does not mean that they're not out to get you!
1TB SSD storage is currently available for about 75€ at best. So it was clear to me from the beginning that this is a scam.
Edit: The vendor has since adjusted the prices!
One thing I have noticed with fake countdown timers is not only do they have a countdown timer for the sale but also for stock levels as in the UK here there is a legitimate company called B&Q which is basically The Home Depot of the UK and sells hardware and tools and so on and my uncle received an email from a random website claiming to be them saying that he could claim a free barbeque worth £200 and in the email it said that there were 5000 units being given but every time you click the link it says 250 units remain and the number goes down quick until it gets to like 150 and then would go super slow and stop at like 100 making people believe that there was still stock and the URL had nothing to do with B&Q. My uncle was ever so slightly suspicious but since he is tech illiterate like many older people he messaged me with a link to the site to verify if it was legit I told him it's fake and that the website has nothing to do with B&Q
I'll give them props for the adapters if they work, that's more value than a lot of companies include now.
For those websites where what they sell seems very random, have you ever bought their non-tech products to see what the other junk is like?
February 2021, I bought a case from Wish that was advertised as 8 TB for little money. When I tested it on my Windows-10 PC, it presented itself as 4 times 2 TB flat. There was no way I could initialise them into one drive of 8 TB. The files that I stored onto it did not properly work (sometimes they seemed to be okay, but not really).
So, I opened the case and found a PCB with a small USB-hub. Four USB-sticks were attached to the hub. I detached them and tried them on my PC, as I would use any arbitrary USB-stick. I initalised them as FAT32 drives. After that, they appear to work as 2 TB drives quite nicely. No more hickups whatsoever.
So, the only scam that the vendor pulled on me (and probably many others as well) is to present an "SSD" USB-drive that was actually a set of four USB-sticks. But for that price, I believe it is fine. I have 8 TB of stick volume available for about 35 euros. And I still got a pristine SSD USB-case lying in my stash, ready to be used for any project that may come along.
@@channelname9843 That app did not show me any issue (yet) with my 2 TB sticks. As far as I believe I get the message, people experienced the 32 GB limit in cases where 2 TB was advertised by the scam vendor.
I am copying a large set of files now onto one of my 2 TB sticks to test whether it will bump against that limit, but until now, it is doing well, having exceeded 37 GB, and still going strong. Perhaps the stumble will follow at some later point, I don't know yet, but let's just wait and see.
EDIT:
There is now about 57 GB on this stick after which I stopped the copying session to see how thing are now. The video files are still working, so I can't detect any flaw in this. No 32 GB limit for me, so it seems. Could it really be that these 4 sticks of mine are actually 2 TB each?
"So, let's bust this thing open to see if we can find out what parts it's using-"
As someone who worked in departments where I was exposed to this kind of thing, you got one thing wrong. You cannot use the prices that products are sold to consumers as a base for how much they cost the companies who sell them or their actual base cost. Although I'm sure the price scale is different, most companies pay WAY, WAY less for the things they then sell than what's listed as the sale price.
An example is a leather bomber jacket I eventually bought from one job. The jacket was on the shelf for $300, but had been discontinued and returned to the manufacturer. The one remaining jacket had been overlooked, and I found it in the warehouse. The store that was selling it had only paid about $60 for the jacket; since I worked in their returns department, I was able to see the price it was originally purchased as. With my employee discount, I was allowed to buy this supposedly $300 jacket for $50.
Very often, stores will jack up the prices to make a profit. The more rare, difficult to obtain or desirable a product, the more extreme the increase. SSDs are extremely in demand, and so most companies will jack up the price to make as much of a profit as possible. If consumers could see how much those same products cost the company that is selling them to purchase in order to sell, or how much it costs to manufacture one, they would be upset.
The name of the flash drive was freaking hilarious! 😆
Flsah* drive 😂
I have one named "Insert product name"
When he showed it in System Information, it listed "Flsah" as the manufacturer's name.
This reminds me of when I bought a portable fan if I remember right and the idiot that made the manual misspelled "could" like they've never learned past tense before.
I think the 4th warning means “Don’t fall for this scam” 😉
I'm so glad you have done this review because I have been caught out several times by buying SSD's and micro SD cards that do not have anywhere near the capacity they claim to have. Amazon and eBay should be doing more to ban the sellers of these bogus products.
I love he's like "oh look made in China" like that's the suspicious part lol...
The most suspicious ones of all claim to be „Made in Britain”. 😳
But given the reputation of our fire extinguishers, that could just as easily be a suttle warning as well… 🇬🇧🧯🔥🙃
When it's in an unnamed box with sloppy instructions, then yes mad in China is very suspicious.
I got conned by a seller in Sydney Australia. Claiming 2Tb SSD portable drives. Failed first time I used so pulled it apart and found 2x64Mb thumb drives inside. Seller disappeared off eBay but fortunately eBay refunded my $$
Thank you for the work you did on this!
My pleasure : D
Your sarcasm is coming to life and dripping off my phone screen onto my hand! Weird things have been showing up on my hand now, and I wonder if that means your videos are 'growing on me'! 🤭
I've been enjoying your shows, and have oft wondered "That shit can't work!"
Thanks for validating my presumptions! 👍
I really enjoy your videos. Love the cheeky comedy. Keep them coming!
Haha, when I saw the title and thumbnail of this video, the first thought going throuh my head was: "let's see how much hot glue YOU will find in this..." :)
Seems like there are various schools regarding these fake SSD-s and the main difference is how much glue they use :)
7:53
That's why you disable the auto-updates in Windows if you haven't for some reason. If there's an urgent update, it'll notify you, otherwise it'll update on the next manual restart (and you can still choose to restart without updating if you want).
you actually cant always restart without updating, my hp pavillion (good gaming laptop) forced an update for windows 10 and refused to let me restart or turn it off unless i updated it. Yes i couldve just let it die, but then itd still force an update, and not ever turning it off is really unhealthy for a laptop and its components
A few years ago, I got a few USB Flash drives that were 128GB on eBay, at around the same price of 16GB USB Flash Drives at the time. When I copied video files and starting playing them back, ones past a certain point in the folder will not play back. Discovered they did that trick of telling the OS that the drive is bigger than it is.
A 1TB SSD, whether internal or external, from a reputable manufacturer (e.g., Western Digital/SanDisk, Crucial, Samsung, Seagate, etc.) should cost around $100 to $150, depending on the brand, speed and interface, from a reputable reseller.
There was a pricing error at Walmart last month when they sold a 960gb PNY drive for $30 instead of $96.
"Who am I? Linus tech tips?"
that unexpected to me. hahaha. didn't know he know about Linus
You didn't think I knew about one of the most famous tech TH-camrs in the world?
I kid, but of course I do. LTT used one of my meme templates, so that's my recent "claim to fame" haha.
I was just thinking, what am I watching Linus tech tips?
Then your comment. I laughed :) well played.
@@mcriot ; )
I bought 2 similar 8 TB drives on eBay. My intention was to use them for my Plex Media Server. Upon delivery, one drive was 8 TB and one was only 4 TB. I tried transferring a few movie files onto one of the drives. The data transfer speeds were atrocious, about 15 Mb per second. I got my money back and will never touch cheap SSD's again.
do they actually technically claim it's 5Gb/s anywhere? AFAIK since newer USB specs also include the features from all previous revisions, even a 1.5Mb/s keyboard can be considered perfectly USB 3.2 compliant.
??? no it doesn't. USB 1.0 is compatible with, but not compliant with USB 3.2. To be compliant it has to support ALL features in the spec, not only a small subset
Well some things never change. I learned this when the Ipod was a thing and ordered some cheap knock off from China on Ebay. All files got corrupted when exceeding 1/8 of the promised capacitity ( I guess it was promising 8GB ). Reformating showed the true capacity. So I refunded it and got my money back and some excuse about the differences between bits and bytes. Total BS because then it would have shown the true capacity before I formatted it. I said I would write a bad review if I didn't get my money back and he chose to play it safe, just to make potential new victims along the road. These things kept on selling for a while and also kept on evolving over time to this day when you see things like these ssd's. So buying this from a website like this also probably means you have lost your money forgood
Man, I live for your scam busting videos! Seriously the best on YT and love your sense of humour Ken! Keep it up!
And this is why I only use known brands from a trusted retailer I've been using for nearly 20 years, respectable prices too. I never use places like Amazon or Wish etc for any electronics.
Atomic Shrimp appeared out of nowhere lol
When talking about the price, you forgot about one thing: manufacturer and seller margins.
And for electronics they are HUGE. I have seen electronics that cost $500 as a whole and if you buy all the parts in them and assemble + program it yourself it would cost just $50 or even less.
This is especially true if a device is copyright/patent protected, since the monopoly caused by copyrights allow even bigger margins.
You forgot another thing, too. There is no-one that says that fake SD drives cannot be sold for the price of original ones.
Cap
I once had an uncle who wanted to get some videos from me so I suggested he mail me a 1tb external drive. Instead, he sent me a 2TB Flash Drive. I warned him these were scams but he thought since it was from amazon they were legit. I used hwtest and lo and behold, it was a 32GB drive. He sent me a proper external hard drive after that.
4:15 - You can't get 8 TB of storage in *ANY* media for $99. Even a used slow 5400 RPM datacenter spinning-rust 3.5" hard drive on eBay is more than that. (When bought from a reputable seller of used verified-good IT parts. Sure, you can probably find it cheaper from a dodgy source.)
You can get a 15 TB HP Ultrium tape cartridge for $55 Brand new directly from hp
WD p10 external is 5TB for $99, so pretty close. I recently got a 8TB WD red plus for $139, but it was on sale.
If the storage device isn't a Samsung, Sony, Western Digital, or Sandisk then it's an iffy device. But generally if it's not made by a well known highly trusted company then you're probably going to get scammed with a fake/faulty unit.
10:49 technical incompetency 🤣🤣🤣🤣
that in a nutshell 8 tb ssd won't be that cheap for a long time🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
A company I worked for got scammed when purchasing flash memory chips. My company tried using a new distributer with a dubious reputation, so our company made a small "test" purchase, and they sent us good chips. Satisfied with that order, our company made a larger order... and the whole lot were fakes; they were "rebranded" as bigger capacity parts. These fake parts went into inventory, and when the time came around to use them months later, past the return date... and we were holding the bag of bad parts and had to panic order the parts at a much higher price. Needless to say, we had a BIG problem with SMALL capacity.
Very timely reminder that things that seem to good to be true probably are. BTW ... it is a shame that h2testw doesn’t have a mode to check files as it goes along rather than during the second phase.
It's doing the check at the end for good reasons. Lots of fake drives work in a loop, after you wrote X data (and fill its actual capacity) it will start again from the beginning of the drive (and overwrite anything else you wrote before). If you don't check at the end when ALL data has been written, this looping trick will fool it.
@@marcogenovesi8570 ... I’m not saying it couldn’t also check for consistency at the end, but having to run a 2 day test before finding out the drive is only a couple of gig isn’t exactly optimal use of resources.
@@CTCTraining1 The issue is that you can't figure out the real capacity just by reading in the first pass without already knowing how big it is.
Like if you read right after the first 1gig file done written, it'll just pass unless the drive is actually smaller than 1gig.
At the end,you still need to wait until 2nd read pass to know that it's actually looping.
However, it's possible that you can read after 1/2/4/8/16/32/64... gigs written, should be faster than just read after written the whole drive.
@@danny8376 ... exactly, I was probably not making myself clear. Much appreciated.
FakeFlashTest.exe may be faster. It just writes blocks at intervals over the whole memory and reads back at various stages. AFAIK it has only been tested on devices up to 2TB though...
6:19 this is still faster than my internet speed most of the time :D
Lol 7:40 "SHEWANTSTHE (D:)"
Great video, Ken. Stay safe operating your drives and don't fall!
6:57
Manufacturer: Flsah
the scam busting train is going well lol thanks ken a proud scambaiter
0:45 - I also like how they are _specializing_ in retail products. Just another giveaway.
I love the USB flash drive name: "SHEWANTSTHE (D:)"
How to spot such scams.....say it with me "IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE......." 🙄😏
They are also on Amazon now, be careful.
I love the name of the 16GB flash drive!
5:37 "don't shake the body"💀💀💀
That is a m.2 enclosure that you use to hook it up to USB. I bought a couple of these to test m.2 drives I pull out of broken laptops.
Did you even watch the video
@@ww11gunny doubt it
4:52 the box says it's just an enclosure. They just slapped an 8TB sticker on an enclosure box. Probably bought a case of enclosures for the scam.
So that is what happened.... I got snookered into buying a few and did not have a clue why they did not work properly... Contacted the seller and got confusing answers. Just tossed them in the drawer and forgot about them until seeing your video. Thanks for filling me in on what happened...
11:32 Here's the card, smashed in the process... 😂
No Windows didn't restart during that test, MacOS restarted during BOTH of your BMD tests! Thank YOU, APPLE! It's not like I have anything better to do with MY life!
Been binging KKTM, then got this notification
Noice!
I bought one of these devices (not from the same company, but from Amazon). I got the 4TB model (USB 3.1), and as Ken said (and I quote) "The speeds are absolute crap!" I use the drive as a backup, and store some video files on it as well, yet the files won't run and I actually have to move it to my own device's storage.
0:54 Minidisc player? Who still buys those, atleast for that price...
Thank you for covering this problem. Many non computer savvy people will buy it because it was sold at a cheap price compared to all the original hardware. Then, added with lots of online shopping platform doesn't take down these people for selling fake items quick enough. Thirdly, the fake 5 stars comment usually cover up the 1 star which states the lies and manipulation of the fact that those items are fake.
5:40
no, like the other dead bodies in the lair. don't play dumb Ken.
I'm so glad I found your videos Ken. Not only do I learn a lot that I didn't know but I get to laugh a lot too because you are just hilarious
Google translate be like: 5:20
To be honest there's a lot of USB 2.0 pen drives that are just a SD card in a trenchcoat^W adapter.
But those are usually a lot less scammy than this. I remember some ~6 years ago a number of SATA "SSDs" that were actually weighted down to "feel" they had an actual boards inside.
Hey Ken, i think on that last part of the video (11:52) you were wrong, that chip should be the translator that converts MicroSD to USB and that the shaddy firmware was on the MicroSD itself because you can also buy fake capacity SD carts and also since it's usb a chip like tat would be required.BTW Love the Scam Tech Series and i am excited for the Second Part. Cheers
in other tests a quick look onto the USB device tree did unveil much of the true nature of the data transmission chain.
The price is low on purpose, so the cost of doing anything about a claim out ways the purchase cost. There have been loads of these scams going back years. I bought a 1tb HDD and found out it was 2TB but was portioned to only show 1TB as the other 1TB was corrupt with damaged clusters!
How was the 1TB drive a scam? You paid for a 1TB drive, and you got a 1TB drive that used to be a 2TB drive. Sounds fair to me.
Quite frankly even SanDisk will make corrupted parts on drives unwriteable and sell them as the reduced capacity. Keeps them out of the landfill
you know, you can set windows 10 to NOT update when connected to a metered connection, and then set your current connection as metered. This way, windows will never update.
love the smell of malware
@@marcogenovesi8570 You the guy that clicks random ads and links from your e-mail or the places you go to on the internet? Maybe that guy who likes to download things and keeps getting baited by fake "download now" buttons? I'm sure he can afford another PC that is dedicated for testing. And that testing PC doesn't need to be "always up to date", unless that's what they're testing for.
@@grenzviel4480 updates don't stop phishing (if you double click and give admin access, then it has admin access) so what are you talking about here?
Updates protect from automated malware.
@@marcogenovesi8570 that's precisely why updates are not really needed on testing PCs (unless needed for a test), because they're supposed to be for testing purpose only. If you didn't get it, you're not supposed to log-in with your own personal accounts on testing computers. Seriously, you cannot get phished if no one is logged in. Even if "hackers" gain remote access to that PC, it shouldn't have anything valuable because it's only for testing purposes. Hell, I wonder why it even had internet connection to update when he tested the SSD.
@@grenzviel4480 he is a Mac user, why asking all these questions
This same item is all over Amazon as well - Disgusting. And even worse, if you look at all the reviews, they appear that a human didn't even enter them (bots?), with comments saying "The drive tastes good" and such. Just to get the 5 stars. If you look at the reviews farther down you then see the one start "real" victims that got scammed. And yes, me being tech savvy, I know NVME drives are not cheap. They DO have 8 TB ones, even 16 TB, but they are THOUSANDS of dollars. Glad you opened it up and showed that it's anything but an M2 drive in there. I feel sad thinking how many people fall for this. Very screwed up scam.
Bit surprising that there's an actual PCB inside instead of a USB drive hot glued to an USB adapter
It needed the PCB for the SOC that reports the lies about its capability to your computer.
@@troy3456789 You know USB Sticks have a flash controller as well, right? That's how they make those 2TB USB sticks for 5$
@@donotatme USB sticks have the controller on a PCB. Open one up to see it.
@@troy3456789 ah, you didn't fully understand my original comment, got it! I meant this thing has an apparently purposefully designed and fabricated PCB inside of it instead of using off the shelf USB adapters and a fake capacity USB stick hot glued into a case. Hope that clears things up.
@@donotatme This is your original comment: "Bit surprising that there's an actual PCB inside instead of a USB drive hot glued to an USB adapter". It means that you're surprised or shocked that there was a pcb inside, right? Welp, it turns out in order to fool the computer into believing it holds more than it does, it needs to have a place to mount the chip that lies to the computer. No PCB? it would report its actual capacity. I hope this helps.
Been there. $12 10TB "SSD" "flash drive". Turned out to be a dual micro-sd card reader, which fortunately is somewhat useful to me anyway, but only USB-1 interface, so garbage. Got it from eBay if I recall correctly, didn't bother pursuing it due to the very low price. To top that off, no way to insert/extract sd cards, as the board was hot glued in with enough hot glue to connect a towrope to a truck (OK, exaggeration). The single micro sd in it read as 14TB, but it was actually 8GB if I remember right. Yes, it's possible and pretty easy to edit drive info to misreport it. Do your research, I didn't!
Incidentally, before destroyed, yours was a dual micro sd reader also, almost identical, enclosure and all, to the one I got. Small world.
Great content, Ken!
really good!
That moment when a m.2 SSD is claimed to be "fast", but gets beaten by a lowly QLC SATA SSD (practical speeds I.E. slightly above that claimed 500MB/s)...
12:16 Aren't you being watched by the guards?
Yup, I got scammed into this exact model. Oh how gullible was I to believe that I'd be able to back up 16TB worth with the price of 1TB. Like you showed, all movie files are corrupted and my working files were not loading! A penny wise a pound foolish.
I've seen phone on legit shopping websites that have 8gb ram and 512gb storage, for just $99... Yeah it was a fake I knew it. But the thing is about 99% of the thousands of ratings are positive!! So I don't know if they buyers aren't just tech savvy enough or what.
I've also recently watch a guy on TH-cam purchasing similar device and the actual capacity is 1gb ram 8gb storage. And android 12 is actually like Android kit kat. So yeah.
The reviews are probably also fake
I bought what was said to be a Samsung 960 Pro drive from Best Buy Online, but when I tried to clone my existing drive onto it, it mysteriously threw an "Unexpected error" at almost exactly 1/8 of the claimed 1 TB capacity and was never writable again. Fortunately they accepted it back without raising a fuss, but even the bigger chains are getting hit by these.
I then realized I still have PCIe Gen 2, so I opted for a much cheaper WD Blue that still saturates the four lanes available to it.
Sadly there have been a few cases where actual retailers have ended up with contaminated supplies (which is the reason why i now try to buy only from the manufacturer wherever possible)
the case of drive was used for shonky electronic lighters in 70=80s. lately im seeing the cases used for shonky chargers, vspe inhalers and sata drives
5:35 yo don't diss Linus. He might drop $h!t a lot, but like you, he knows what he's talking about. Plus, he's in the 10's of millions of subs across his 8 channels (me being 6 of them, I follow 6 of them on youtube don't @ me)
Woah chill man, understand the joke
@@kowugi I've watched enough LTT to know how often he drops stuff. I'm more or less just as bad.
"Flsah" - I can't stop imagining how someone was configuring this and were like "Yeah, that's okay."
You keep appearing in my feed, I’m trying to do delicate research, and I get caught in these videos. they’re just so entertaining please stop appearing on my suggested feed 😅😂
I had to buy a 256gb flash drive about a month ago, and my gf said "just buy one" after I was taking 3 days to find the exact one for a good price I wanted... I tried explaining this issue and she was shocked 😲😳
I stay away from Flash type storage if I need to store a ton of family vids and photos or e-docs, long term, like in my safe. The problem (yes I've experienced it first-hand approx 10yrs ago) with Flash type storage (i.e. thumb-drives and sdcards) is, it relies on DC power from your device to magnetically charge and hold all those millions of tiny transistors/switches in their set "On or Off" positions. Now don't panic. All of them, no matter which brand, will retain their internal magnetic hold reliably for several weeks if you need to take it out of your device.
But take heed, if your Thumbdrives/SDcards sit unpowered for too long, thousands of those tiny transistors/switches will slowly start losing their magnetic hold and will drift out of their set positions. If enough of them in each of your saved files drift far enough out of position, the next time it receives power from your device, they will be sent to the opposite position, corrupting those files permanently. Over 900 out of the 10k pics/vids, stored on three thumbdrives and two MicroSD cards were corrupted and those drives were a mix of three different brands (Sandisk, Samsung and PNY.
Since then, I only store my files long-term, on my Seagate portable external drives that have the good ol' reliable 2.5in SATA's in their protective cases. Heck I don't even trust the two small portable Samsung T5 SSD's (1TB each), that I carry around. I only use them because their read/write speeds are so damn fast.
Honestly, anyone buying no-name/off-brand/Chinesium tat, at a tiny fraction of the price of genuine storage devices, deserves everything they get! Ok, bit harsh, not everyone is tech-savvy, but trusting data to ANYTHING that isn't from a proper brand is NUTS! I "give away" several flash drives every day to my clients, and could save hundreds of dollars every month by buying cheap flash drives, but it's just not worth the aggro. Lexar, SanDisk, Samsung...these are pretty much the only USB flash drives I trust. This really is one area in which brand-name products are TOTALLY worth the extra $$!
Something that should be noted: those drives that are actually SD card readers can be VERY dangerous.
Because at heart it’s just reader being reported as an SSD, it’s very easy for the SD card to be swapped for something containing malicious hardware which can be done in bulk. (Something that’s much harder to do on a fake ssd without as card)
The best part of these fake hard drive scambusting videos is when the enclosures are broken up and we see the hodgepodge of electronic components soldered and glued onto a cheap board.
I saw an ad just now for a scam claiming to be a new inovative mosquito killing device called BuzzBGone or something along the lines of that. It had the typical ad where it claimed a made up engineer created a new technology that uses a specific type of uv light to attract and kill bugs more effectively and even claimed it was test to be 8 times more effective than other mosquito traps. Although when I looked it up I couldn’t find the ad again
Back in the old day and before online shopping, people were selling 25GB of hard drive in black market or street market when the hard drive was actually 5GB. History repeats again for SSD.
Sweet video! But you really went all out on the disassembly of that "ssd" looks like a wolverine attacked it 🤣