News New Freeware Detects Fake USB Drives with Inflated Capacity

[kjfatl]

Glad to have an additional option than H2testw, which is great but it is dated.

I am more worried about counterfeit Samsung/ Sandisk/Kingston drives you pay high dollar for and suck on performance, as I stopped buying flash drives and micro sd cards off marketplaces long ago. But the counterfeits are hard to detect, not as obvious as 1500 PB drives for $10...

The obvious solution it to get Samsung, Kingston and other suppliers to provide a link to this program, or similar programs to verify the authenticity of drives with their names on them. The program would have to contain some sort of randomized data so the thieves can't just record the signature from a good drive and play it back. If would also need a speed verification test.

 

[pjmelect]

Fake capacity is an old scam, nowadays the scam is that they get a say 32GB device and turn it into a just under 64GB device by removing all of the overprovisioning so that they can sell it as double the capacity (and double the price). Such a device will be slow and unstable in that after you have used it for a while it will go into write protect mode.

 

[Colif]

its really a question of educating the public... but keeping people in the dark is too good for profit now... so I guess that won't happen. People need to at least know what isn't possible.

Problem is a lot of people who get fake drives refuse to believe they could possibly be fooled into buying anything fake, we had one guy who didn't believe us. Said we were lying.

The obvious solution it to get Samsung, Kingston and other suppliers to provide a link to this program, or similar programs to verify the authenticity of drives with their names on them

shame a lot of the fake drives don't have a brand name on them at all. They just use a nondescript enclosure with an sd card inside, who do they contact to confirm its real?

The victims still need to be capable enough to find the website or link to program... it can be fun finding the Samsung driver page, if you search wrong terms you can get the wrong page (I have done it).

 

[tamalero]

If you have a USB drive you suspect might not offer the capacity it was advertised as offering, ValiDrive puts it through a 576-region spot check.

New Freeware Detects Fake USB Drives with Inflated Capacity : Read more

Wait.. "new" ? I had seen these freeware tools for years 😵

 

[tamalero]

Fake capacity is an old scam, nowadays the scam is that they get a say 32GB device and turn it into a just under 64GB device by removing all of the overprovisioning so that they can sell it as double the capacity (and double the price). Such a device will be slow and unstable in that after you have used it for a while it will go into write protect mode.

Problem is, instead of preying on USB drives now. I have seen they move to NVME/SATA "drives" that like others... instead of using an USB bridge.. they use a NVME bridge to USB then to USB to the classic little SDcard.

 

[tamalero]

its really a question of educating the public... but keeping people in the dark is too good for profit now... so I guess that won't happen. People need to at least know what isn't possible.

Problem is a lot of people who get fake drives refuse to believe they could possibly be fooled into buying anything fake, we had one guy who didn't believe us. Said we were lying.



shame a lot of the fake drives don't have a brand name on them at all. They just use a nondescript enclosure with an sd card inside, who do they contact to confirm its real?

The victims still need to be capable enough to find the website or link to program... it can be fun finding the Samsung driver page, if you search wrong terms you can get the wrong page (I have done it).

Let's not forget that there has been very real-like fake devices that looks exactly as the sandisk and kingston.

 

[Colif]

I wonder which ones get faked the most. Probably Samsung, even though the largest USB they sell is 256gb, people would probably think its much bigger... not accounting for fact anything bigger is an ssd now.

No reason storage makers couldn't put a page up linking to tools like this... just getting them to do it is another thing.

Still requires people to look.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

I'd imagine this works on SD cards if not directly with a USB reader?

Either way, this is good to validate but question how many stores (online) would believe you got a fake from them and just write you off as a customer instead. *cough Newegg*

 

[peterblaise]

... MacOS ... VM/api/etc. What would a Linux user or Mac user do to accomplish this same goal?

There are MANY 'fake finder' tools out there for years, most take a long time and some are destructive.

ValiDrive is quick and non-destructive, and a stepping stone in the development of SpinRite to understand fake - and faulty and failing - drives.

Others have said that ValiDrive runs on a Mac with a VM and Linux with VINE.

Old 'throw-away' PCs are cheap or free ( already in our closets ), so having a drive-testing station makes sense, especially for hardware geeks.

 

[peterblaise]

Wait.. "new" ? I had seen these freeware tools for years 😵

Yes "new", ValiDrive was reviewed by Tom's Hardware on the day of public release, 2023-10-07.

The 'fake finder' tools out there for years that you are thinking of often take a long time and some are destructive.

ValiDrive is quick and non-destructive, and a stepping stone in the development of SpinRite to understand fake - and faulty and failing - drives.

 

[TerryLaze]

Isn't it just solving a problem that should have already been solved by OS manufacturers years ago?

Wouldn't an actual format, not the quick one, reveal a fake drive?!
It would mark all the blocks that don't exist as bad ones, or not?!

 

[RobJac]

Terry, the firmware on these fake drives is much smarter than that. The firmware is working at a lower level, and simply reuses sectors. It never returns errors, always reports success whether reading or writing.

Steve has reported that these fake drives almost always have a 16GB or 32GB drive within them, then when you attempt to write past the true end, they remap sectors for your write, so you're actually overwriting what you previously had written there. It's easy to get away with this, since 16GB is actually quite a bit of storage for most people, and unless you're a more technical person, you're not likely to even know if your later files have been overwritten. And if you do detect a problem, you're not likely to blame the flash drive. Remember that the drive never reports any errors!

Even if that format is one that actually tests every block, it has no way to know that the sectors it's testing are the same ones it's already tested, many times, and never saw a single error. Even a 16GB drive is plenty big enough to hold a FAT for a claimed multi-terabyte drive. Pretty clever fakery.

 

[cyrusfox]

Even if that format is one that actually tests every block, it has no way to know that the sectors it's testing are the same ones it's already tested, many times, and never saw a single error.

True a format will not detect as computer trust the firmware of a drive (low level formatting). you say you are 128GB, will allow format. Would require some inventive code to test a sparse map rapidly to prove a falsehood, it is possible to change format to make it validate drive size, but likely better to not open that write amplification pandora box...

By writing to every sector and then verifying/ reading what is wrote is how all of these work for detection. If it is a fake drive, when it gets to the spill over region it will find data that does not match the original input and flag as a bad sector. If you put in real data, sorry it is lost and garbled...

I have found when using these drives that only the initial data you put in them is recoverable, see the example above for a 64GB drive, that is really a 4gb drive. You can write the first 4gb and that data is retrievable, only when you try to read anything past its true capacity will the device hang forever(time out).