Are Your Flash Drives Mostly Fake? (Worse Than You Think)
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- Here's how to tell 🤔
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ValiDrive: www.grc.com/validrive.htm
▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
1:23 - ValiDrive
2:10 - Demo With Fake USB Drive
3:42 - Demo Results
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▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ - Наука та технологія
@ThioJoe : Great job showing ValiDrive! (which I wrote) I think I'll link to this video from the program's home page since many people would appreciate seeing it go! Thanks! :) And very slick additional graphics to clearly show what's going on. Very nice!
Yea appreciate you creating the tool, it is extremely useful 👍
Thanks for not bloating your software like people do nowadays. Even though you're going quite low with MASM here.
Can you verify if ValiDrive would also detect fake drives that use a modulo? From what I've read it wouldn't... so h2testw or f3 on Linux are still the only (slow) option for these to be sure.
Basically the drives use a modulo like 64 GB for real 64 GB capacity, and use that on every positioning on the drive. So one can actually write at 1 TB of an 2 TB drive and read the data back ok. Just that older data at the beginning of the drive is overwritten by that.
I've heard some drives don't even store the real memory at position 0 but somewhere higher up. (though that might have been the persons fault when they tried to "fix" the drive via partitioning.)
Great to see you here, Steve! Another awesome piece of software, along with SpinRite and of course the DNS Benchmark. Grateful to still have you developing these applications and catch you and Leo on the next Security Now podcast!
what an awesome tool, simple and VERY effective
Your GRC site is a resource I've been using for a very long time. Thanks for your great work over the years!
Can we take a moment to appreciate that this is a fully functional windows application that isn’t dependent on any installed runtimes and it’s 95KB. Steve Gibson writes all his utilities in assembler.
And the majority of the file size is due to the digital signature (4 KiB) and high-res icons (56 KiB).
Yeah that's what happens when efficiency is a goal of the programmer instead of just throwing together some shitty electron app
@@mgord9518 ah, you’ve used Teams then.
ooooh thats pretty cool, most applications go "ooh hey you need to install this and that to run me" or "i m missing verys-pecific-dllfile-you-need-to-google-to-know-what-it-belongs-to.dll" the second one being very very annoying
@@JoducusKwak what kind of apps are you using that need you to do that? I haven't looked for specific DLLs in a LONG time.
Steve is nearly 70 years old and has been coding in x86 assembler for 40 years continually producing the SpinRite drive checking software since the early 80s. He also publishes Security Now the podcast which has been going for nearly 20 years too. That could explain the old timey style of the software, and thats why the EXE size is so small - its hand coded assembler.
God that sounds old! 70! Fortunately, I still feel about half that age! :)
Been listening to you and Leo since episode 1 - you actually helped me get a career in podcasting and Im 45 and feel half that age too! :) All the best Steve! - @@SGgrc
We love you Steve !! ❤
In about 35 years, that won't seem old 🙂@@SGgrc
The reason for forcing the user to re-plug the drive may be a sanity check so the user can't test anything but the drive they intended. Also the program sounds like it'll be great for finding out if a drive is dying, how useful! :D
I have no idea if this is true but an idea I had with this is that the validator may hook into the drive while it is interfacing with the operating system, before the driver is loaded and set, a way to gather information uncorrupted by lies that would already be in place when the drive is fully initialized. But again, might be techno garbo.
@@ShadowOfTheSPQR It wouldn't make a difference, the memory controller lies.
@@blunderingfool This would not be a matter of asking the memory controller anything.
Yea true, that was one thing i thought of
It might be a safety check to prevent the user from scanning the system drive. Only looking for newly inserted drives would be a quick and easy way to accomplish that.
The Monochrome Map is intentend for the colorblind people. Although most can still see that the colors as different, with different shades, it would be better for them if the difference is more noticeable
it probably also helps if u plan to print it
colorblind*
also 40th like
@@ZerickKilgore ouch, didn't notice the typo 😅
@@MarcioHuser What typo? If there was a "u" after the "o", then it's not a typo, it's simply British spelling.
@@CZghostI corrected the type. It was "colorblinG" 😅
Amazon really needs to be more motivated to crack down on these scams. They are literally everywhere on amazon and blatantly obvious.
When I noticed the scams, stopped purchasing ANY drives from Amazon.
Amazon even deletes negative feedback about being fake. Atleast in one Atomic Shrimps video did.
The Chief Executive Officer of Amazon should do something about it because they wouldn't want the company to be filled with negative reviews and other crap that could harm the company.
Obvious how?
@@stevevastathe price. You're not going to get a 1 TB pen drive for $20.
Wow - just realized 3 USBs I have are fake and I am getting my money back from the merchant as we speak - you literally just saved me like 50$ because of this video - THANK YOU
I just tested my 1TB flash drive and it's coming back as only 32GB. Thanks for the video.
As I've stated in a comment on another video, I had that happen to me back in 2016 while I was on a cruise. I was given a supposed 128GB MicroSD card for Christmas 2015 to use in my digital camera for taking pictures during the cruise. I did not know that the family member who bought it, bought it from Ebay for $10. The reason I didn't know is because they wanted it to be a surprise. Well, in a nutshell, when the cruise ship was docked in Florida (we were going to the Bahamas), I took over 200+ pictures with my digital camera and when I went to view them on my camera, because I didn't have a laptop with me, I discovered that almost ALL of those Florida pictures were completely lost FOREVER and I was beyond angry when that happened. I will NEVER purchase ANY type of storage device from Amazon or any other website like that, unless it is cloud storage, I will go to a physical store to buy it outright.
Don't trust cloud storage either - not in lieu of a physical backup! Apart from the problems associated with storing files in the cloud, you will not have all of your files physically on your system, and some programs, especially utility programs for backing up and renaming files, will not see files that are not physically on your drive. Also, there are occasionally back-sync issues, when it syncs the wrong way. This is more likely if you have more than one computer using the same cloud storage; often the latest version of a file on your computer will get replaced by an older version that was, for example, recently saved on a different computer or even deleted from another computer.
That sucks :( I've tried something similar like that. After moving my photos from my camera to a USB, many of the files got corrupted even though it looked they weren't gone. I bought a cheap USB on Aliexpress so it's my fault for not thinking straight. But what about a trusted brand that sell on Amazon as well as in physical stores? I've bought SanDisk USBs in physical stores and on their official Amazon page too and I've never experienced any problems
Big ouch!
I allways destroy everything on a disk or stick and start with partitioning, formatting and dumping random data onto it, until its space runs over. This is the prove that it's working correct.
Those memories will live FOREVER in our hearts ❤🔥
It's surprising that no scammer has yet used reasonable prices so at least the product wouldn't look suspiciously cheap.
I agree ... but I also think that it's part of the strategy, because they don't calculate on digital well educated people on actually buying their drives but your average Joes and Josefines, which think they got a real bargain and then when they eventually find out the drive failed they think it's defective "bad luck" but nothing more serious which combined with the low price just makes them just take the loss instead of demanding a refund and therefore giving the scammers little to no fuss about it.
I think that, in a lot of cases, scammers don't try too hard to hide the fact that it's a scam so that the knowledgeable and the sceptical will pass on by and they'll only hit their target more gullible mark. Makes for less scamming effort on their part.
You're overestimating how intelligent the average consumer is. Don't forget that countless people fall for scams where you have a guy telling you to mail them Google Play gift cards to the "IRS" and countless others of the sort. Most non-tech people would have no idea what a 2TB drive should be priced at.
They have done. I bought a competitively-priced SanDisk 16Gb USB stick that was actually fake. I knew it was fake just by taking one look at it.
It's actually their tactic, you aka buyer will less likely to get "angry" if you buy fake with cheaper price, it's like their way of telling you that this is fake and if you buy it then you know you buy a bad quality product and has no reason to get angry to me.
I got a fake USB stick long ago. Ever since then, I've only bought flash memory devices with brands I recognize and only from reputable dealers less likely to end up with counterfeits. Never had a bad one since.
I've gotten some flash drives from Aliexpress for cheap. Including the Kingston ones.
To no suprise, non-kingston ones are almost all fake, few ones are actually good.
All Kingston ones are suprisingly good, though.
Got 4 64GB from eBay (reasonable priced) all fake.
Might have been a better idea to contact Steve Gibson and either have him in your video or have him explain things to you, so you can explain them properly (like the reason that some drives are fast and some drives scan more slowly). Monochrome view is for people who are colour blind. The report saves in RTF format, so you can take a screenshot of that. I do like your suggestion to be able to have the window bigger, by perhaps putting a maximize button in the software.
I like to be able to take a screenshot of the results within the software as an easy way to show context of what software created the results
@@ThioJoe No argument from me. It would have been nice to have that. I was in a rush to get back to finishing the update to SpinRite, so I was trying to 'steal' as little time as possible. :)
@@SGgrc OH! So glad to see you there! You are my favorite listener of Security Now! :D
Steve Gibson's GRC products are top notch. Used his stuff for many years, always Red Hot and accurate
3:39 the monochrome view is most likely meant for people with color blindness or vision problems. That's likely the reason it exists.
N word
@@Chomta what
@@MinusNC YES
Coming 😩😩
I actually used the old german software back in the day that filled the drive up to see how much it could write. Yes it took ages to do but called out a "Samsung" micro SD card I got on eBay back in the day. Now I only buy from Samsung's Amazon store directly. It looked authentic in every way
That was a great tip! I've been using Heise's flash drive tester, but that one is brute force, mow the lawn, solution and takes hours to crank through 400 GB of flash. Validrive finished in a couple of seconds. My hit rate on fake drives is about 33%, since I tend to buy cheap, and the cheap ones are more likely to be fake.
I've only ever had one fake drive in my possession. It did this weird thing where the writes basically went to a looping queue, so every write was successful and up to the real size of the drive could be read back accurately. It was super annoying when I had some data and the only part left intact was the end of it.
Sadly these tools wont be seen by the vast majority of people who buy these drives. These are commonly bought by elderly people, because they see this price and that seems reasonable to them as things were indeed alot cheaper back then overall, and sellers know this. Amazon really needs to hire somebody to anonymously buy these drives and test them.
As long as Amazon do the bare minimum to combat them, they have no other incentive to do so. If it makes the news they can just put out a press statement and people will forget once the news cycle moves on. Many people will only buy through Amazon these days, and they've stamped out a lot of the competition with the free delivery on orders over a certain price, and the speed people are used to of anything sold or fulfilled by Amazon.
I try to avoid them where possible these days (especially since they ended Smile, and often other retailers can have the same product cheaper) but I doubt most people would have that sort of self-control.
More to the point: Electronics are much cheaper now than they used to be. My first laptop, with a 210 (? sounds wrong) MB hard drive, cost three times as much as the much more powerful laptop i use now. (And this tablet cost one-eighth as much.) It's logical to assume that flash drives would similarly offer more for less money.
I still remember paying 125$ for a 32GB thumbdrive, turned out to be fake. Because of that, I went back to 4.7GB DVD which I am still using to this day. Also the monochrome map is really good, my father can't see color at all so it is really helpful for people like him.
I have still DVD-RAM in use.
Nice that there's finally A quick tester - I wrote A drive tester when I suspected A "2TB" drive of being fake (it was) but it took FOREVER to run.
And yet I'm surprised people think something like ValiDrive is new... h2testw (or f3write on linux) is quite old by now.. (8+ years). I do like the quick test speed of ValiDrive, though h2testw is more thorough. Not sure if ValiDrive even detects fake sticks that just math mod 64 their storage... (if 64 is the real capacity) as you can actually write data at the 1.5 TB mark and also read it back. I thought this is how all fake drives work... I sadly don't have fake drives with me to check if ValiDrive would detect those... Given the authors description of it, it won't.
This is great, thanks Joe. I recently bought a Samsung 128 GB flash drive and just tested it using Vali Drive, and fortunately it's a genuine 128 GB. The test was very fast. I bought this drive from Micro Center so I wasn't really worried about it being fake but I certainly would hesitate buying one off eBay or Amazon at this point.
Really appreciate the info. Bought one that was exactly as you described on the video. Spent a few wasted hours copying files to only have them all disappear. So sent this link to so friends so they could see it too. Thanks for the ValiDrive program too and best wishes.
Thank you for this. I'd recently bought a few thumb drives to move some movies to my parents TV. Couldn't figure out why they werent working. Exactly like you said, the first one I tested was rated at 62GB, was sold as a 2.1TB and that's what the header says it is.
One thing that people should keep in mind is that flash drives use wear leveling - so it doesn't matter if you only use part of the drive, the more you write to it, the greater the chance it will be written to an area that doesn't exist - even if you never go over the real size of the drive.
Well, that was clear as mud.
Easy solution: Get a flash drive that’s 97% real 😂
Or get 33.(3) flash drives and now you have a whole real one! 😂
Why exactly 97%?
@@muffinyy thumbnail?
This is a good example to buy from Reputable local computer outlets.
Thank you for your beautiful explanation. I tried it on my flash drive, which contains approximately 128 GB, and the result was excellent. It was not fake and was completely green!
Thank you! I have been hearing more and more about fake thumb drives lately... Glad there is a quick and easy tool to verify 🙂
Yep, and not just thumb drives. There's a lot of fake external TB SSD drives that, if you open them up, contain just a 64GB micro SSD, plus some circuitry to spoof your OS into thinking it's 1 or more TB. They're usually very well sealed units, so you have to pretty much break the cases to get into them and check.
@@fredbloggs8072 Manufacturers love to take away right to repair...
I had a 2tb thumbstick several years ago that I got for laughably cheap. The tool I used filled it up to test the storage space which somehow caused the drive itself to fail and it is no longer recognized when you plug it in. I wonder if this software would have been able to tell me how much it actually was. Steve Gibson is really good. Thanks for the video, love those channel
I think the storage wraps so that it will write over the old ones. That way the most recent files will be OK if you check them. The monochrome is nice if you need to print it to show someone.
monochrome is for red-green colorblind
Thank you, so much, for highlighting this program! I didn't even realize this was a problem, and had just purchased a few new flash drives. Happy to say, all but one was valid! The distributer for that one is getting a nastygram!
Really useful video, I saw few usb claiming to 2,4 or 8, but was not sure if it's real , thank you for this video
This is a really valuable stuff!💫✌🏼
Special thanks to you for bringing this towards us & special thanks to the inventor of the software 💙🙌🏼
I learned something new! I didn't realize that some flash drives could be fake. I have a bunch of them. I'm guessing the really cheap ones that I have will be fake. Thanks for the info!!!
Videos like these is exactly why I'm subscribed to you!
If it's too good to be true, it usually is. I think educating people on how to spot scams would go a long way in combatting these grifts. Or Amazon etc. could take some responsibility for the crap that is sold via their platform but I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you. Just tested my main daily backup drive. It tested good. plant test all my drives starting with my camera drives.
Steve Gibson (Spinrite) is a real pro and I would trust my data to him. He has been writing software since the DOS days, and he was an expert in hard drives back when you needed a controller card to use a drive. He also used to (and probably still does) program exclusively in assembly.
this tool is actually extremely useful, thanks for bringing it to light
Very useful. I just bought a lot (bunch) of key drives, and this will prove useful when they arrive before giving a good review
Thank you for telling me that my school project is gone. A "64 GB" usb stick is only 8 GB. Now I can recreate it.
I have just purchased a 2TB usb memory stick flash pen thumb drive off ebay which cost me a total of £5.89. I thought it was worth a chance and totally expecting it to be fake the Validrive confirmed it as genuine. Well pleased.
I acquired some fake hard drives a couple years ago. I figured out they were junk pretty quick before I put any information on them. It took me longer to figure out why they were junk. Fortunately, I was able to return them for a full refund and then try again.
Giant thumbs up! im sending this to a few mates who keep buying "crap" drives and saying "but it says this"
My mom once ordered one of these, after I noticed it's fake, we got our money back, and I trimmed it to its real size.
I guess it's nice that it's functional and free, but the labour cost wasn't worth the capacity, and we still needed a real big one.
Great, thanks for telling us about this utility.
Joe: "you can also choose monochrome view if you want, for some reason..."
Everyone with red/green colorblindness: "EMOTIONAL DAMAGE"
Nice software and good explanation 🔥🔥🔥
Actually I was kind of surprised Gibson Research is still around. I was using his Spinright hard drive recovery tool way back in the Windows 95 days. He had some good firewall test tools too in the XP days
Thanks again Joe for another video of important information that gives yet another thing to worry about! 🥴
That's why I bought my drives only from retail stores with warranty.
The "monochrome view" is, I believe, because there are actually a lot of people out there who have trouble distinguishing colors (particularly red vs green, which is a very common form of colorblindness). Because of this, it is *always* a bad idea to design an application UI which distinguishes important information only by color. You should always have some other way to tell as well, such as also including text, or differing symbols.
It's nice to see that he has considered accessibility in the design of this application and allowed the user to choose other ways to view the data that do not depend solely on differentiating colors.
Thanks for this, Thio. I tested a couple of drives. It's quite slow on my computer (validating a drive takes about 20-30 minutes), so I stop the test after seeing a couple of green dots towards the end of the drive.
Likely useful in the future. Thanks.
I couldn't resist to buy a 25 dollar 2tb external drive that I saw yesterday im pretty sure that is fake but couldn't resist to verify, good thing you have a video for that
I first heard about the fake drive problem a few years ago, maybe on this channel. I forget if it was just flash drives. I always try to buy from a local retailer. I did buy a HD from Amazon once for the CC discount, but made sure it was shipped and sold by Amazon. Otherwise I'd make sure the amazon or walmart seller had a good and lengthy rep.
Requires USB drive plug in is essential because most of the time you do not ( or easily mix up ) the drive letters when you insert a USB thumb drive into PC. Say you already have a drive or SD card plugged in and you forgot / not recognize, choosing wrong drive with this software may cause data loss.
I was actually on the market for a 1TB+ storage device because I needed something to throw files to if I didn't need them immediately accessible and wasn't as slow as a hard drive. Wound up getting a SanDisk 2TB external SSD for $110 AFTER a discount. The scams seem to be pricing higher now to look less suspicious, like in the $70-150 range, but at that point just get a name brand.
Steve Gibson from Security Now! He is the star of the show! I'm a huge fan of him when it comes to anything security-related. And I know about ValiDrive even before I watch this video. :)
Cool little utility. Thanks Joe.
Its depressing how easily companies can get away with blatant lying just to make profit.
The best and most reliable flash drives I currently have are nearly 15 years old... still working perfectly. Newer drives, by comparison, often break down after a couple of months and corrupt any larger file I try to put on them.
I bought Patriot flash drives off of Amazon and they turned out to be fake. Label was normal, no errors. But they had so little space. The guy that made that software is doing the world a favor.
I came across some fake drives a few years back an used a cli tool in linux at the time. Not only did it report back the real size of the drive (32gb out of a supposed 1tb), it allowed you to reprogram the drives chip to report the legit size. Like I said, that was years ago now so not sure which tool I used back then
I think the tool you used was called f3. I always use it as I don't use windows.
Atomic Shrimp did a video on fake SD cards the other day, reported it to Amazon (where he got it), and left a 1 star review with proof. Amazon decided to delete his comment and scold him in an email.
I'd think that on this side of the world, Amazon could be prosecuted as an accessory to fraud for doing that.
Buying a 2TB drive only to find out its just 64GB
These fake flash drives are cheaper than a 64GB drive in local stores, so it's worth it if you don't want to store important data.
@@krystal5887True
@@U.S.A.i can get a 64gb sandisk usb for 9 euro in stores here in Netherlands. Thats not much
We can now get flexed on by members on UA-cam. Hooray!
I got one for my switch from Walmart and it supposed to be 2tb and it not only 8 gb
could you do a video that checks the validity of RAM storage , again great video ,thank you so much on creating such wonderful content that educates people .tested and non of my usb are fake.
I am not sure if I have any fake drives as I usually tend to only buy them from name brand companies like PNY or SanDisk. I do have a few that I am not sure about though that did come with something I bought so I might check this out. I have used a few of his tools before and they seemed quite useful.
The reason for having a non-color dependent chart in the report, is that about 10% of men are red-green colorblind. Confronted with that chart you showed, my husband would say that either the drive is all good, or all fake.
Need to remember old wisdom: if it seems too good to be true, it's probably not true. If 1TB HDD cost 50+, how could flash drive be 20?
You bought the exact one I got.
I also bought a different 1TB flash drive before that one. The first one I got turned out to be 8GB. I figured it was just defective because it wouldn't play any videos I put on it.
So I got the one you featured in your video. I am confident it ruined my front facing USB drives it was that bad.
I reported both fake drives/sellers to amazon and they responded by taking down my one star reviews I left to warn other shoppers. But amazon then deleted my review.
I unloaded righteous indignation on them through an online chat after they took down my "verified purchase" review. They ended up putting my review back up after I blasted them for the decision.
But I don't really care my review is back up. The fake flash drive is still for sale.
Amazon doesn't give two squirts of a rat's butt that people are being conned on these things. I guess they figure as long as they allow returns and refunds, their customers should clap and be happy like beached seals and not care they allow scammers to proliferate on their website.
Monochrome mode is likely for colorblindness if you are colorblind in certain ways you wouldn't be able to read that color chart at all, I am not colorblind but I am glad they included it.
Love this shorter format!
the monochrome is just a nice short and simple way so that ppl colorblind to red/green can also use the program, nice touch
Love the tool tip videos
The monochrome view is for people like me who can't see the difference between VALIDATED and WRITE ERROR. I appreciate the creator for the accommodation.
All of your videos are incredible
3:01 imma be honest, for people silly enough to buy usb drives from non reputed brands probably won’t know how to select drives. This method works like auto detect
The Amazon scam goes as follows. The fake seller will make a listing for an item that's completely different from a flash drive. One where $15-$30 is a realistic price for a legit one. They leave it that way for a while and let the good reviews come in, then, once they have enough good reviews, they change the listing to the fake flash drive.
Monochrome view is probably for colorblind people.
Just because you're colorblind doesn't mean you can't be tech savvy and interested in usb storage capacity. I think it's a nice touch, niche programs usually don't have this sort of functionality.
Now that I think about it, could also be for black-white printing of the reports.
It's more likely for black and white displays
@@talibong9518where did you see such displays connected to a Windows PC
@@shortcat Every display I've ever seen connected to a Windows PC was black and white. (kidding)
Came here to make sure Steve Gibson’s tool is mentioned. Nice!
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Over the years, I have been lucky to not have any fake USB Thumb Drives or any type of media to be fake. When I buy a device of any type I read the reviews. If there are issues very often there would be bad reviews indicating the faults.
So, if you discover you have a 'fake' drive, you take it back to the store and say.....*uh, yeah, this is fake, can I have my money back?*
Technically, the drive isn't fake, the capacity is. These are also far more likely to be sold online than locally.
Cheers - I'll give that a whirl. I don't think it's confined to just the cheap USB drives on Amazon, Ebay etc. I reckon I've got one from Sandisk as well. I use it for music in the car. But sometimes when you write to it, as you said it writes the data but when you go to play songs (data) from it, they're incomplete.
I have bought a $4, 1 TB USB from Wish back in 2016. I have yet to see how much space it actually has as I still have it. I'll definitely be using this software to check other USBs and ofc, staying away from buying USBs from Amazon, Ebay, wish etc..
👍 Thank you for the information! that was very helpful In case I will purchase e.g. a USB drive, I will try this tool out, in order to check if it was a rip-off. 👍
Years ago I bought some 'large capacity' USB drives and SD cards on eBay.
They weren't that big in modern terms, all around 350 to 500 GB. Eventually I tried copying some large videos to one of them and quickly discovered it was garbage. Couldn't store more than about 4GB. So I then ran the same test on the other stuff. Quickly discovered they were all garbage.
But the good news is, eBay refunded me for ALL of them. So I learned something important and, at the same time, my only actual loss was just a few hours of my time.
So it's probably a stretch to claim flash drives are MOSTLY fake. But it certainly tells us we need to be wary, especially of deals that sound too good to be true.
Does anyone know if Amazon will similarly issue refunds if the product is clearly a scam?
@ThioJoe Thanks for sharing this valuable information to everyone. Really saved me from buying these phoney drives
Joe thanks for your video! What flash drives do you recommend that aren’t fake? Thanks again
I'd just go with Samsung flash drives, they're dirt cheap even for large capacities these days, just not 1 TB lol.
find one from the official listing from a brand you have heard of, make sure the seller doesnt have some inpronouncable chinese name, i would go with samsungs bar usb drives.
Why isn't this video getting popular?
❤very helpful. Thank You
Thanks for making our life easy, Now we can finally know if our flash drive is fake or not
Some fake drives I have seen ( mainly cheap SD cards) , carry on writing data so they in fact overwrite the original causing it to appear corrupt
Thank you I will test this if it works 👍
I had no idea back in 2008 that fake drives existed. I was on holiday in Philippines, my phone memory was getting near full, there was tons of stuff on it not just holiday stuff. I went into a proper looking electronic store and bought a m2 drive. Put it in the phone, did the set up on screen. My mistake was instead of copying to the new card I just did a transfer of files. It seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, progress bar was moving. When it got to the end my photo album in the phone was empty, but sadly the memory card was also empty. Lost a lot of work related stuff and at the time some precious memories of the holiday
Glad i let you know about this tool.
Well, it's good to know SanDisk is trustworthy. I just ran this on the ~500 GB flash drive I got back in May since I was low on storage. Assuming it didn't mess up any files, it turns out it was completely green, so I won't have to worry about it ever.
So this tool is basically echolocation for the drive regions, pretty cool stuff!