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

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USAFRet

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SAS HBAs can be had for fairly cheap if you want to expand the range of options available to DIYers. Then Samsung and Kioxia have 30TB options in 2.5" form factor. The price tag is spicier than $40 by two orders of magnitude though.
Well, yeah.
However, I would not put that in the category of "regular drive".

(looking over at my NAS array, that I could mash together into a single 80+ TB volume)
 
Aug 28, 2022
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Edit I got scammed for 2 one terabyte SD cards 2portable drives and 2 thumb drives, I am a looser with very bad luck. Please see photo
FireShot%20Capture%20020%20-%20Orders%20-%20www.aliexpress.com.png
 
Aug 29, 2022
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I would never hook this thing up to my computer hacked Chinese firmware sounds fun.

Hi folks. I am the person whose tweet thread this article is about.*. Twitter threading is absolutely awful, so many of you might have missed the reply where I explain that I am a cybersecurity researcher with a proper lab including properly airgapped machines, VM's, and forensic gear. Even so, I took additional precautions beyond our normal ones, because I suspected this device might have some malware I have never analyzed or observed before. In fact, I was a bit disappointed to see that it was relatively unsophisticated firmware with no indicators of any APT.

This was a silly and fun little project I did with my teenage son to show him some of the ways you can investigate suspect hardware. I absolutely did not mean to imply you should try this at home.

* (moderators please feel free to validate this via the email address I just verified for this new forum account- it is on the same domain as is in my Twitter profile, and my Twitter DM's are also open)
 
Aug 29, 2022
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Since the cheapest real 1TB SSDs are currently around $60, anything under $40/TB is effectively guaranteed to be a scam.
This is 100% correct. But the people who read Toms Hardware are more technically sophisticated and savvy than 99% of the general population. Most computer users do not know the difference between a megabyte and a terabyte. We take it for granted because we see and use these terms every single day. But there are a lot of people who would fall for scams like these (which are absolutely nothing new, I remember when even floppy disks were sometimes dishonestly marked as double sided, double density when the actual product was tested and certified for neither.

- Ray Redacted, the author of the tweets
 
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Aug 29, 2022
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The quote is not "If something sounds too good to be true, then it isn't. " but "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is". Only a few letters off, but it completely changes the meaning.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/if+something+sounds+too+good+to+be+true+it+probably+is
The actual tweet thread opens with these exact words :

Have you ever heard the expression “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”? Well AliExpress is currently advertising a 30 Terabyte SSD for $29. And I just had one delivered. Let’s open it up, shall we? /1
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
I find the circuit board quite interesting. It actually has 2 micro sd slots.
not all are so generous. Often its just 1 sdcard slot. They must have had a stack of doubles that cost almost as much to put in as the singles. It wasn't done for the customer

as my post that USAFRet linked to said, you can't buy 16tb ssd now so 30tb is way out... I seen 900tb ssd advertised. People have no idea what max sizes are.

Edit I got scammed for 2 one terabyte SD cards 2portable drives and 2 thumb drives, I am a looser with very bad luck. Please see photo
FireShot%20Capture%20020%20-%20Orders%20-%20www.aliexpress.com.png
At least one of those 3 things actually exists. You can get 1.5 tb sdcards, though I doubt they are that cheap. They only just released - https://www.techradar.com/news/worl...-can-store-more-than-one-million-floppy-disks
USB drive way out, biggest real one is 1tb

Good that article exists, make more people aware of the problem, slightly less who will get effected. But these things are everywhere now. Flooding market.

I like some of these descriptions
New 60TB 30TB Mobile External 16TB M.2 SSD 8TB 500GB Solid State Hard Drive USB 3.1 External SSD Typc-C Portable Hard Drive SSD
choose a size... its like a lucky dip but the trick is you get none of the above. But its only $44 so you might be lucky. Totally believable.

why would anyone pay several hundred for a drive when they so cheap on internet...
 
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cfbcfb

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Jan 17, 2020
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The big story here is the big ecommerce folks allowing large item sales by scammers with zero track record in selling items.

It's bad enough that the every day electronics at amazon often don't even meet their published specifications. Worse when you're offered product choices that are clearly scam products. These drives aren't a new thing on amazon. I rarely buy from walmart, so I can't comment on that.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
its amazing what you can find on Ali Express though. I just found a laptop with 1000 gb of ram... i am aware thats impossible but anyone silly enough to believe anything on their site, might not.

Seems fake drives top out around 60tb now. Only 15x the actual size of largest external ssd. Not bad going there.

Just as well IT professionals have some idea what they doing as search Google for 100tb drives and I get
4jdEJpe.jpg

and there is a small difference in prices. You could buy 2 external 60tb drives for 44 $AUD each or pay about 7k AUD for 100tb and still be "short".

When an actual 100tb Exa Drive costs 40k USD, the chances of a 44 $AUD drive having over half of that are really really small.

these fakes may not be on more trustworthy sites yet but its just a matter of time.
 
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Inthrutheoutdoor

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Feb 17, 2019
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Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I am not trying to insult anyone, but when it comes to tech stuff, the old saying comes to mind:

"Cheap is as cheap does" - Forest, Forest Gump (well sorta anyways!)

And fyi, yes, I buy a lot of things at wallyworld too, but tech stuff aint one of them :)
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
The prices shown on the SSD always show the price you pay for smallest size. So 70 cents is probably for a "4tb SSD" whereas if you open the link, and click on the image of a "16tb SSD" you get the higher price

From what I can tell, the only people with a 1tb SD Card that is real is Sandisk and all the ones in your photo probably just photoshops of it - https://www.westerndigital.com/en-a...disk-extreme-uhs-i-microsd#SDSQXAV-1T00-GN6MA

That V60 on the cards would be the simplest way to prove its lying as that is its minimum transfer rate. V60 = 60 mb/s minimum -

V6 Speed Class means that the minimum write speed of the memory card needs to reach 6MB/s, V10 is 10MB/s, 30 is 30MB/s, and so on.
that and there are no 1tb V60 drives yet. Most V60 cards are around 256gb still

So its a bald faced lie what is stamped on these things, shame its up to the consumer to discover it.
 

JOSHSKORN

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Oct 26, 2009
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OMG 30TB for $39!?!? Such a great "deal" !! LOL

No, really...if that were legit, I would actually think they'd be around the $1K price point for HDD and $3K for SSD.
 

eye4bear

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Jul 12, 2018
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Stay away.

No more "real" than one of these:
Depends on what you mean by USB hard drive, I have several WD external drives that connect via USB that are multi-terabyte in size. Yes, I saw another article that warned of these being scams.
 
Aug 25, 2023
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Really? Seems to work for me. Plugged it in, formatted it, took a while but I got it done. All I see here is a lot of anti China BS and not a lot of evidence. 29296.86 GB available after format and it's definitely a USB 3.0, and no, I'm not chinese, I'm portuguese. It seems a formerly reliable site like this one is loosing credibility over bigotry. Shame
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
I would suggest you test the drive with one of these programs


what they say they have may not be real. The controller lies. The flash just writes over top of itself. Its speed is a clue too.

Just because you can buy them doesn't make it real.

its hardly your fault.

the real biggest USB flash drive is only 2tb now - https://www.techradar.com/news/excl...y-dollar190-and-delivers-ssd-like-performance

as for ssd, you can get a 32tb ssd for as cheap as USD6200 - https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/pricing/ - I assume yours was around same price?

 
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USAFRet

Titan
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Really? Seems to work for me. Plugged it in, formatted it, took a while but I got it done. All I see here is a lot of anti China BS and not a lot of evidence. 29296.86 GB available after format and it's definitely a USB 3.0, and no, I'm not chinese, I'm portuguese. It seems a formerly reliable site like this one is loosing credibility over bigotry. Shame
Purchased from where?
For how much?

Link, please?
 
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