Thursday, October 25, 2007

Fake USB Flash Drive


There are an increasing number of reports about the presence of FAKE USB drives being discovered in the market. It is discovered that some USB drives are sold with only HALF or even 1/4 of the actual memory capacity as they claimed on the drives. For instance, in a spurious 256M USB drive, inside is actually a 64M flash memory. The firmware inside the drive has been modified with compression software to report 256MB in Windows. It allows copying files over 64M. However, the files that are copied beyond 64MB would be corrupted. It is known that a counterfeit USB drive using branded package is being sold using this cheating technique.

Samsung Electronics has already denied any original Samsung branded USB drives are being supplied in their line. The dishonest manufacturers may also use the same technique under other brand names (such as SanDisk, Sony, Kingston, Imation, Ben-Q, Hyundai, Laser, LG, Toshiba, Transcend, TwinMOS).

Tips to find out whether your USB drives are genuine
  1. Be suspicious about unreasonably low priced offer on USB drives.
  2. The fake will deceive you by displaying the 'false/oversize' capacity when you connect it to your PC, however they will NOT be able to store the data to the stated capacity.
  3. So you MUST perform data test by writing a BIG (1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB) file to the usb drive, then READ back the same file from the usb drive to another location on your PC to compare. The READ back process is the only proven way to uncover its 'REAL' capacity.
  4. A genuine USB flash drive will complete data transfer of a single 1GB file anywhere from 50 to 180 seconds writing to. Usually the writing time is twice as long as the reading time.
  5. The fake will take an excessively long time (1 to 7 hours) only 'pretending' writing but the data was not actually being written. Hence when you try to read it back, it will claim data as being CORRUPT. Many have reported that many strange files/folders eg. 00000.000 will appear and you cannot delete them.
  6. The counterfeit model cannot be located or matched with any genuine models on the manufacturer's web site.
By the way, also applies to fake Compact Flash/Secure Digital/Memory Stick!


Via : BEWARE of FAKE 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB USB Flash Drives on eBay

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

wah, mesti hati-hati nih kalo beli fdisk ... ^^
thnkz infony

salam kenal .. ^^

shiera said...

I wasn't aware something like this is happening...thanks for sharing this

Anonymous said...

wahhh.....info berguna neeeh !!!

Sándor said...

Hi,

I'm from Hungary.

Thx for this good topic.

I bought a cheap Emtec 4GB pendrive in the Auchan and I s.cked.

It seems, it is only a modded 1GB drive.

I will take it back (again... because it is the second one... I didn't know what was its problem till I found your topic).

Anyone who read it (from Hungary or from elsewhere:) : be aware!

Br,
Sándor

Anonymous said...

There is a nice free tool, which allows logical/physical check of the USB thumb drives, pendrives:
http://rapidshare.com/files/102465993/ChkFlsh.zip.html
Check Flash 1.03

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green pc said...

Pre and post sales support from designated account managers will help to ensure that whole process runs smoothly and you are provided with the correct information from the outset. Remember that guarantees on products are worthless if the company is not around to honour them.

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