BE CAREFUL - Cheap USBs

[Lyp14 [ctxa]]

So a few days ago, I went with my wife to a restaurant for dinner, and they gifted us a 256GB KINGSTON USB Drive. Now, upon a first glance I thought, wow! Today is my lucky day... they gifted me what should be worth around 1,300 THB and the bill I paid was around 1,800 THB for two people, that IS amazing value! 

 

... Or is it? On second thought they must be dumb to gift such a high valued gift

 

Me, being an IT guy, I suspected this is a fake Kingston drive, and the manufacturer modified its firmware to get it to "lie to Windows" thus appearing as 256GB... Let's try to prove my theory using a tool called FAKEFLASHTEST, this tool is free to use and very easy to use (y'all can use it to test your USBs if in doubt).

Surprise... 

 

Wow... so this USB Drive should have 255,996 MB of storage (~ 256 GB).... But, wait for it... its real storage is 272 MB 

What this means is, if you have bought one of these cheap USB drives which sell in Lazada for 145 THB... and you want to back up your wedding photos into it, which let's say your wedding photos compressed in a .zip have a size of 10GB, so you put the file into the USB, unplug it, delete the file from your PC thinking you have a backup, wrong your photos are gone, gone forever, and now your wife wants to kill you, for being a moron and losing the wedding pics... 

Provided the real available storage of this USB is a laughable 272 MB, every time you copy 272MB worth of data into it, it will start overwriting what you've already written. So 10,000 MB / 272 MB = 37 times that it will overwrite itself, virtually rendering your data completely corrupt and unusable. 

 

Do not buy cheap high storage USBs - it's not real! You will lose your data!

 

 

Edited February 18, 2022 by Lyp14 [ctxa]