News 30TB Portable SSD Hits Walmart For $39 But Stay Away From It

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Stay away.

No more "real" than one of these:

Info - Buyer Beware - 16tb or larger External/Portable SSD/USB drives are fake

You currently cannot buy a real 16tb external SSD or any USB drives larger than 2tb, at all. They don't exist. But if you look on almost any retailer now they show you ssd that are labelled 16tb, 30tb or larger still. These are all fake. Same applies for any USB flash drive bigger than 2tb...
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Now I'm all curious about what it costs to make these, how long it takes to create and package each one, how many people are involved, and how many they have made... and how many they have sold.

I've had a few friends who nearly fell for similar storage scams. Luckily, they know that I'm "the computer geek", so they ask me about it first. For people who are just casual users that don't know everything that's under the hood, or don't follow tech news and prices everyday, I can see how they could easily be conned.
 
AgentBirdnest said:
Now I'm all curious about what it costs to make these, how long it takes to create and package each one, how many people are involved, and how many they have made... and how many they have sold.

I've had a few friends who nearly fell for similar storage scams. Luckily, they know that I'm "the computer geek", so they ask me about it first. For people who are just casual users that don't know everything that's under the hood, or don't follow tech news and prices everyday, I can see how they could easily be conned.
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Pennies to create.
At most, $1.

Buy in bulk, couple of thousand cast off barely working flash drive innards.
Your Chinese factory assembly line worker slaps them together on the line, dozens per hour per person.
Stick them in a large USB hub to be reflashed....
In a box, done.

So...
$1 for the materials.
$1 for the assembly.
$1 for the shipping.

Sell for $25 to the clueless.

Profit!

You see these advertised all over.
Facebook, Amazon, ebay...

We've had more than a couple of people here that bought one of these, insisting there is XXTB actual drive space in there and wondering how to enable it.
There is not.
 
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DingusDog said:
I would never hook this thing up to my computer hacked Chinese firmware sounds fun.
Click to expand...
Yet people do...

[SOLVED] - How to test storage capacity of 16TB SSD drive

I purchased a "High speed 16TB SSD drive" from Walmart's website. I suspect that it is a fake, but need to know how I can test its capacity to see if it will actually hold 16TB of data.
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Question - 16Tb SSD drive

Hi All, thanks for the add! I need some info on a 16Tb SSD external Drive I purchased, It wont keep data as I did purchase it for storage, I copied a whole lot of data over and when I wen to add more later on the drive was empty. have formated it to exfat, alls fine, but then I decided to...
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Question - AliExpress SSDs

Hello Team, I'm running out of storage and I want to get an external drive so I can keep movies, series etc so the drive will not be used in general, rather I will plug it from time to time to transfer the file from the external drive to a PC or Laptop and paste the movie onto the local drive...
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Shouldn't someone be criminally liable for selling these? False advertising? Counterfeiting? I mean, you can open one up and see that it just contains a pair of 512MB microSD cards. It's one thing to get one from some shady site, or eBay, but here they are showing up at big-name retailers. Does Walmart just ignore responsibility for products that they are listing on their site that ship from third-party sellers?
 
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Aaron44126 said:
Shouldn't someone be criminally liable for selling these? False advertising? Counterfeiting? I mean, you can open one up and see that it just contains a pair of 512MB microSD cards. It's one thing to get one from some shady site, or eBay, but here they are showing up at big-name retailers. Does Walmart just ignore responsibility for products that they are listing on their site that ship from third-party sellers?
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Who wants to send an FBI team to China to investigate some sweat shops for selling fake products for $ 20 - $30 that costs them around $5 to produce? ¯\(ツ)/¯
And as far as the retailers like Wallmart go, they can simply blame it onto the supplier and provide refund if/when asked.
 
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Most likely it's Wal-Mart the will receive the brunt of this damage here. Most likely they had a buyer that was fooled by a super-cheap price. It's possible that the first few hundred units sold and evaluated actually worked. They probably shipped a bunch of 'bricks' to Wal-Mart and got paid for them before customers started complaining.
 
Never fall for too good to be true scams. These are very common. With drives or even memory cards that advertise huge sizes, but in reality are more like 32MB memory card or maybe bit bigger USB drive, i n both cases factory QA rejects that didn't meet the standard with hacked controller to show bigger size. And once they run out of space just keep overwriting existing space. So they make them really cheap. Also they can potentially come with malware.

Also similarly common is graphic card scam, where you get what is supposed to be newest card for cheap, but is actually old card with hacked VBIOS, so it shows a newer. Like GTX960 showing as whatever card.

Also similar is true gor fake phones. Doesn't matter which spec it shows, reality can be completely different. On those people even found hidden app that allows you to set basically any spec and it will show in Android. Be it SOC, memory, screen resolution,... you would think it would break something, but nope, it can be edited to show wrong value. Also they always have 1 real and few fake cameras.
 
Scammers and crooks too focused on making a dishonest buck really lack imagination.

In their shoes, I would make a 666 PetaBytes and 2.718 ExaBytes and 3.14 ZettaBytes portable USB drives specifying they are FAKE, legal and honest for entertainment purpose and/or psychological support.

Entertainment: make a joke on someone by offering one, just showing off in front of candid people, sending "true" screenshots to friends with astronomical disk free space.

Psychological support: I remember a medical TV documentary showing a placebo study with people taking placebo medication KNOWING it was placebo but still getting better simply thanks to the routine of taking it everyday. I guess it does not work for everybody, but statistically it worked. In the case of these giant disks, it would be showing off to oneself.
 
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InvalidError said:
The marketplace operator should be liable for false advertising and fraud by third-party sellers who have no assets to leverage liabilities on in the countries their crap is being sold in. That would eliminate most of the foreign seller fraud.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. I've got bum (faked capacity) sd cards, thumb drives, etc and I was avoiding the cheap, clearly scam sales that litter walmart/amazon by 3rd party sellers. So I am all for punishing sites who enable this neferious behavior. Saving 5 bucks or so shouldn't have you sweating the legitemacy of hardware you buy. When you see 16/30TB drive for under a couple hundred dollars, you almost deserve to be fleeced but these bum drives permiate the market top to bottom (usually but not always 3rd party sales). And while I have always got a refund when this has happened (at least 3 times in 6 years or so), it shouldn't be a thing to begin with. Plus more times than not despite my request to pull the bogus postings only one time did they (amazon) actually do so. Holding the 1st party legally liable would be a huge step in fixing these scams.
 
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Yes I have 4 drives two 15TB thumb drives and two of these 30TB drives in this article and after my transfer of 7TB onto drives all files were corrupt, sorry my bad, I was tricked, they are trash and I am out about 200 dollars
 
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