Fake USB Drives
Cheap storage drives are advertised everywhere.
’Grab a 250 Gb drive for $20!’ the adverts shout. Everything looks great, such a deal. Even the reviews are all 5 stars.
You send them your money and get a shiny new box wiht a drive that shows laods of space. Nice.
You dump some files onto it and it works. Thats fantastic.
Then a little while after using it and a bunch more files stored you go to retreive it and then the dreaded “Unable to read file” error pops up.
Humm. All the files are listed but after a bit of digging you find that all the newest files are reporting Zero bytes or just are filled wiht zero’d data.
The drive must have gone bad…. Maybe it was me… Did the files copy in the first place….
If youve had that happen then dont blame yoursef. Blame the drive manufacture for selling you a scam.
Blame Amazon and eBay for removing all the bad reviews and ony alowing the 5 star. Blame an advertising industry that allows the scams without accountability. Heck blame Santa Claus because it is all a load of crap.
Turns out the drive manufacturers grab a bunch of 20Gb drives, reprogram the firmware to report a much larger size and then sell them on and run before people start complaining too much. Even though this has literally been going on for at least 10 years now its still rampant. Most of the USB drives you get at trade shows or for free with a can of soup are all fake.
But…
There is a little light at the end of the tunnel.
A free utility called ValiDrive from the security and hard drive guru Steve Gibson checks your drives and reports if you have a scam drive. And thats all it does. He wrote the utility because he bought a couple of them and didnt want anyone else to get bit by the fake hard drive scam.
As a photographer or videographer having your media lost because someone wanted to make a few dollar is unacceptable. Ive seen a couple of these drive in the past and have even had a genuine drive fail in a similar way after a year of use (not the same but same effect).
The worst part is because of how drives work, the data appears to all be there and will even pass Windows , MacOs or your camera’s validation of a copied file so you have no idea that the data has not been written correctly.
ValiDrive uses a simple cryptographic algorithm to generate reproducable data in all the sectors of a disk. Once written it will read the data back and if it gets the correct info then you get a happy green square.
If not (if the drive is a fake) then you get an angry red smear that will probably fill the majority of the disk.
It only works on Windows (no Mac or Linux even under Wine unfortunately) but it is completely free. No adds, no spyware, no subscriptions.
Check your drives. If they are OK then you have peace of mind. You only need to do it once anyways so go to a friend’s house if you dont have a Windows machine.
If you have got one of them, and with the amount out there chances are at least some of your USB drives are fake then you know to chuck it into the e-waste bin.
If you would like to support Steve and all the fantastic utilities he writes you can pick up a copy of his Disk Utility SprinRite
Im in no way affiliated with it, Im just a long time fanboy as its saved a disk if mine in the past.
