*It's an obvious scam but people may still fall for it if they aren't too careful. Just be careful when buying stuff like this* Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment in my iWish series! I said I wouldn't. I know, but I bought this as a pure curiousity, simply because it uses SATA instead of USB. Hope this was still entertaining for the first video of 2024 (Happy New Year also everyone!) and thank you to the folks that did donate towards seeing this and other products on the channel. I appreciate you all so much :) Let me know what you thought of this one down below! TIMESTAMPS: Introduction & Disclaimers: 0:00 The Listing, Pricing & Comparison: 1:44 Unboxing: 3:56 The 4TB Drive & Taking it apart: 4:58 Plugging it into a PC & First Issues: 6:17 Testing with H2TestW, More Issues etc: 7:24 Further Analysis of the Board: 8:40 HD Sentinel, AS SSD Benchmark, Second Test & Results: 9:50 Final Thoughts, Be Cautious & Rambling: 10:57 Thanking folks & Outro: 12:27 Be good people!
I had to service a computer that was acting up. It had a drive very similar to this in it. The client had bought one and installed it as their boot drive. After getting windows installed, Steam, and a few games, it crashed exactly like that. People have fallen for it, and I'm just glad this client hadn't had enough time to put a lot of their life on it.
It's just hard to tell anymore and obvious to one person, may not be obvious to me, so I truly appreciate you taking the time for stuff like this! I'm still in the dark sometimes about what is good VS scam products and I really love trying to keep up with the good, bad, and ugly of computers, electronics, etc.... but it is HARD!!!
Thing is it's not that obvious to everyone. I've thanked you in another post for the heads up on this, I know I'm going to have to warn people of it and I doubt I'll be the only person who's seen this video and will be warning others. Good work mate, every time you point out what you might think is obvious, someone who doesn't think it's obvious finds out the easy way rather than the hard way, even if it's at 2 or 3 degrees of separation.
@@mitabpraga7487 Yeah, that's the problem. If you don't look closely at it, you won't spot it. I didn't see it myself until I pulled it from the system and looked closer. It's just close enough that it'll pass a cursory inspection.
Hilarious that they lasered off the markings from the controller chip but put the part number on the board silkscreen. Kinda makes me wonder if some of the laser-etched/sanded chips aren't blanked to hinder reverse engineering, but rather late-process reject chips from real manufacturers that get blanked on the production line to prevent resale as genuine but still make it into products in the "literally trash" end of the market.
Nice theory, haven't thought of that! I wonder if IC manufacturers would have to start physically breaking chips to avoid this happening, but then again dunno what they can do with rejects, in the industry nobody really throws anything away fully, it's all recycled in a way after all.
@Kalvinjj I know that some famous 80s home computer used a lot of semi-defective ran chips that were good enough for half the intended memory (obviously this memory lacks detail but I think I got what I did remember pretty correct)
@@catlover10192 That is pretty standard, or was some years ago. Fabs would have one production line, and test the chips before etching, sort them based on working capacity and/or speed and then etch, and sell as different model number based on what they tested OK as.
A few years back when a drive like this was $65 I found a 512GB Lexar SSD on Amazon for $35 shipped. I thought it was too good to be true but it was Amazon so I knew i'd get my money back and went for it. Turns out it was 100% legit and someone was dropping stock in a liquidation sale. I should have bought 10 of them. You win some. You lose some. I still use that drive to this very day as a test drive for PCs I assemble. And it still runs like a champ.
Oh wow that's actually a crazy story. You really got a bargain with this one and it encourages me to possibly try and get a drive using this method. However, I would only recommend to those who actually know how to test these drives and wouldn't put anything important on them even if they show up okay
@@RMED24it's always fun to do these things, but I like to keep in mind that it's more about the hobby than it is getting a good value. After all, the time spent making sure a drive is legit and works well could be spent on more profitable endeavors, and then you can use that extra money to buy reliable, warrantied drives!
Meanwhile I tried a 2 TB SSD some days ago on Amazon, normal price - and it was a scam. Amazon is just crap they simply don't push out companies that scam...
I don't know why, but even after all the storage device videos I've seen you make I still love watching this stuff. It's just fun seeing the different lengths they go to to make these things.
Yeah, I'm divided on those. On one hand you got a drive that works at a price appropriate for the size, on the other hand you still gave the scammer money. Of course unless you got your money back. Seen that with faked graphics cards. Flash them back to what they actually are, make a claim to get the money back, enjoy a free low-end backup card.
Congratulations on the enlightening video, I bought a HD SSD very similar to the one in the video promising to be 2 TB, but when I went to use it, I discovered that despite showing the capacity of 2 TB in Windows, it crashed whenever the amount of data exceeded 120 GB , the internal structure of my equipment is exactly the same as shown in the video. Thank you very much for clarifying our doubts.
Could this be defective device 'recycling'? Because why would they do any extra effort for a scam product? It realistically won't take long for a buyer of a 4 TB drive to realize it's rotten. They could just as well shipped a case with no PCB in it. And why remove the controller labeling? Some kind of serial number traceability?
Serial no but there's a batch identification on ICs indeed - week and year code, facility code and some top secret rolling codes. If you have one device, you might not know exactly but if you have a few dozen, the IC manufacturer and counterfeit experts can trace them.
These obviously scam tech items are a guilty pleasure to watch. We all know its bullshit but seeing the stuff these scammers do to make it seem legit is so interesting
Inevitable, I suppose. Thanks for the video, one more thing to warn my clients about. Especially the guy who 2 years ago gave me a €40 "1TB" flash drive to back up his stuff to, the guy who last year gave me a €50 "4TB" USB SSD for the purpose and the guy who I just know would get one of these tomorrow.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosAbsolutely, but it can be a tough job telling some people that. Tell them to look at the general retail price of a 4TB SSD and some will just think the RP is a ripoff if they can get it for a quarter of that elsewhere. The flash drive guy, when I told him the bad news, told me he'd bought it off Amazon "so it must be ok" (I quote verbatim there), and took his flash drive to another techie saying I was trying to rip him off for the retail price of a 1 TB HDD and USB case. And that's despite the fact that I'm just a techie, I don't actually sell stuff...
I recently bought a kodak branded 128GB ssd off aliexpress for £3. Interestingly, the pcb looks very similar to this one, the controller is also a realtek, and the flash chips also appear to have had the markings removed, though the difference is that the advertised capacity actually comes up in the testing. Not sure about the reliability as I know the chips might be used/low quality, but since I use it in my test PC with a throwaway Windows install for plugging in and testing random things, I don't really care if it suddenly dies.
A couple of years ago, I fell for this basic scam on a 1TB drive from an ebay seller. In my case, the usable capacity was something just north of 64GB. I ended up finding a flashing tool on a Russian site that let me flash it to be a 64GB drive. I only use it for light duty, but it seems to operate with no issues.
I wish there was a way to re-flash the card back to being recognized as 120GB. If it worked as intended, it might actually be useful rather than just being E-waste.
@@endurofurry I'm not so sure of it, because a 256GB SD card i got from Temu (as a christmas gift, no less) became unreadable after i tried to format it fully. It just broke 75% into the process, lagged my PC and was unrecognized afterwards. Only with a recovery software i could even look at the thing as it popped in and out of existance, which is when i found out it was a spoofed SD card with stats written in by hand, but nothing i could do made it readable or able to be formatted.
@@DarkestVampire92 maybe a different brand, i was talking about the ones used in this video. i personally have a couple. i buy them here and there for cheap boot drives for testing rigs and file transfers. to freinds as im not worried about getting it back. i even have one in the pc that just runs crome and VLC for media veiwing. its been in there for over 3 years and it runs 24 hours a day with no isues. My only thing is the morality of buying these in the first place and suporting the scam even know i know what im getting.
Seems like a lot of work to recover 10GB. Just use it as a 110 GB drive. Create a 110 GB partition and you should be able to avoid the "crash" part of the drive.
If the controller is a standard part the flashing tool is likely available somewhere on the internet probably on some sketchy looking russian site for hardware hackers. The flashing tool will let you specify the flash chip configuration among other internal parameters and even the sata model number you want the device to appear as to the computer.
I would try to make a 96 GB partition and try the H2TestW again (multiple times) - either it will work, or not, depends on where the capacity was faked and how resilient is the wear levelling. If it will work, it should just report lot of damaged cells (above capacity), as long as the untrimmed space stays smaller than the total NAND capacity.
My guess is that there are thousands of failed SSD's that are only partially usable and they are being sold for high capacity drives for a low price. Those people probably make enormous profits on these drives.
Use the current version of the HDS, otherwise that old version from 2015 does not recognize new ssds correctly. Because of this shows 80% for the performance.
Beware even if this drive could be flashed back to its true capacity the chips used for storage are often old ones ripped from used drives. So they would soon fail anyhow. The scammers are also doing this with drives that are actually the rated capacity (ie a 4 TB that is 4 TB) but often have multiple makes/models of heavily used chips on a single board. Certainly wouldn't trust any data to them!
It's the same as some scam companies selling old hard drives as new by wiping the SMART data and re-labelling (SONNICS is a company on eBay that do this). They look perfectly new until you hit errors.
I bought a 2TB micro sd for 6 bucks once for kicks. It was a super plain 32GB one with a poorly made samsung looking thin sheet of plastic glued on top of it, and glued as in i can see the disgusting spilled glue scraped away on the sides lol. It failed past 32GB. It had a write speed of 7MB's iirc, and read of 27. told ali, and got my money back, and that store terminated.
SSDs will usually not perform as well in a USB enclosure vs SATA in AHCI mode. 550 Meg/second is about the best to expect in any case, you never hit the top speed likely to latency in command processing and data fetching etc. I've had 2 people recently tell me they got amazing deals on 2 and 4 TB USB flashdrives and I've replied with the bad news that it's 99.9% chance they've been scammed and it's just a smaller drive with a controller hack to make it look bigger.
Unless maybe they got the Team Group QX. The 4tb went on sale for something like $170 USD in some region. I am under the impression that they have overstock of 2.5 ssd because a lot of people get Nvme drive nowadays.
@@leucome On the last Amazon Prime Day 2023 in Germany, Amazon had 4TB Transcend 2.5-inch SSDs on offer for 151 euros and 4TB Samsung 870 EVO 2.5-inch for 172 euros.
When I first saw this I thought "for that price you can get a real 1TB SSD", and then after he showed the price of the real one, I double checked and WOW have the prices gone up, nearly double on the low end in just a couple months.
I enjoy getting fake storage devices in my hands because it's super fun when it's possible for me to re-flash firmware and change the "real" name of the drives that the computer sees. This drive could be some fun if it was a bit cheaper, would love to see if those extra NAND spots work.
The extra locations could be populated but if you're going to do that then just get one of the SSD pcbs that dosdude designed and make your own proper drive with known good parts.
a small board in an enclosure is to be expected in ssd. they could make enclosure half size but there would be no way to mount and secure it to prevent it moving. the real size factor scam comes from when they claim hundreds of tb in the same dimensions witch can come from a sd card paralleling card that can take several sd cards and adapt them to sata and raid them into 1 big size.
Hoofddorp is next to the Amsterdam airport where many giant companies have shell offices inside of The Netherlands for low tax reasons. This address points to one of these random office building with tons of international businesses that only collect mail from there and nobody is working.
it is weird how 8 months ago, i bought the 4tb ssd... yes, sata not m.2(though, they were literally same priced at the time for same capacity) on amazon for 180 british pounds. how exactly did it go up in price? i went for 870 evo. almost half a year later for old tech, i'm expected to pay 220 or about 20% more? for aging tech? samsung ssd's suck a nut... 4tb samsung sata ssd equaled to 3.27tb on windows, before the OP.
It should go down in price, with the advance of technology. I brought brands like goldenfir, kingspec with 940GB in aliexpress for less than $50, filled them with my files and working fine for now.
I did a bit more searching and from the details that others have posted of what looks like the same drive, those are Micron B17A 512Gbit (64GB) 64L 3D TLC flashes, reject quality (below SpecTek rebrand) based on their markings being crossed out. The bright side is that you might be able to reflash this SSD firmware to use them in SLC mode, getting a ~40GB SLC SSD that is far less likely to lose data, which for $40 is... not bad.
I remember seeing these on amazon, and ebay a little while ago, before a lot of them got pulled down, but it's surprising how common these kind of scams are.
I did manage to snag a 2TB TLC Lexar SATA drive (LNS100-2TRBNA) directly from Amazon US for $62 USD this summer so the scam prices aren't shit honkingly insane, but still too good to be true.
So tired of scammers... I got a 1tb flash drive for Christmas that was bought because people don't know... F3 probe in linux tells me its a 512 gb but it does this same data loss at like 110 gb..... Only thing I want from scammers is phone calls as I will waste their time as long as I can.... Its kinda enjoyable listening to them get frustrated....lol
With the 4 NAND chips it may reach the 500 MB/S A couple months ago I shut down my desktop and the next day it wasn't even beeping or showing the BIOS/POST screen, it was turning itself off after 4 or 5 seconds as if something was really bad, I was already thinking about a fried VRM but in the end the culprit was a 480GB Intel Enterprise class SATA SSD. I wasn't aware a SATA drive could prevent a motherboard from booting at all. It also prevented USB to SATA enclosures and converters from being detected.
@@SianaGearz It could be but I scrapped the drive... It was an Intel drive with a Dell "Enterprise Class" logo, I haven't looked at what Dell means by that, but I have many WD Green hard drives and some that have around 60k hours started to report reallocated sectors but I didn't lose any data, all of the unstable sectors were recoverable and I was able to make backups, on the other hand I had a pair of WD Gold "Enterprise Class" and both died suddenly around 20k hours without reporting any SMART errors before... So by "Enterprise Class" it seems to me they mean overpriced drives for businesses that have backup tape drives instead of higher quality drives 🙄
I got caught with this a few years ago. Was a 1tb for $25. Weird part was it’s actually a real ssd. Just not a 1tb ssd was a 120gb ssd. They also have an nvme 1tb scam drive too that’s the same thing. I installed windows on it. The second it reached capacity it did nothing but blue screen and couldn’t be used anymore. Real size was 64gb
First time viewing one of your videos. Time stamps etc. made it fun to watch. Imo the bright yellow/blue text in your video thumbnails are hurting your views. Maybe 10 years ago they wouldn't be mistaken for spam/AI content but nowadays I think people tend to stay away from those.
I remember when I had a PSP and bought a memory stick from Amazon that turned out to be a fake. Since then I absolutely will not buy any storage device from any store except the brand manufacturer or a reputable provider. And Amazon, Aliexpress and their ilk are not reputable providers given that they're making money from this scam and the number of refunds they eventually issue must be a tiny fraction of the cash they rake in. It's not even worth the grief.
Interesting. Are these ever recoverable? Like, being able to make them work in their original capacity at least? Not that it would be desirable, but just as an exercise.
@@moth.monster No, it doesn't work, since the full flash capacity is still aliased several times, so when flash controller writes to one flash location, it actually pops up in a bunch of repeat locations. The full drive capacity will be used for wear levelling. You really need to reprogram it for actual flash capacity.
SATA? that's from dinosaur era man... lol! i was in middle school "Elementary"....it's good that it was brought up. Do you have any of those "FLOPPY DISK"? lol!
These realtek chipsets on this board is actually not so bad, i had a legitimate 120gb one with Intel TLC NAND that actually works great. Assuming these suspiciously sourced NAND chips arent full of bad blocks, the firmware could be easily modified to appear as a real 120gb SSD
But it's still overpriced. There's any number of reputable Chinese brands which will give you a genuine 500G SSD for less, and 120/240 capacity cost barely nothing, people don't buy them much. I remember i bought a Kingspec i don't know 32 or 64 which was enough to upgrade a first gen Atom netbook to Linux, nearly 10 years ago now, and it cost me barely nothing, and that company is still around; major companies simply didn't feel it was worth it to them to make such a price reduced product, and yeah it's a real SSD, not some weird contraption. Since then of course several other decent Chinese brands popped up - wouldn't choose them over Crucial for my PC, ultimately at comparable specs and capacities the price difference isn't at all large, but they're fair enough to just fill out your devices with necessities.
Similar scam has been going on with LTO tapes. You can buy a 15TB tape and it only has 6TB capacity!!! How can they get away with that. Aliexpress sellers should add "4TB compressed" with very small letters, maybe.
Those laser scrubbed markings are such a Chinese classic, always the same. The funniest is that they do it with any form of scam, including IP theft products they clone out of good products, so that other's won't reverse engineer their own clones. So yes, they steal, but don't want you stealing back. THAT'S wrong!
Wondering if they could've used an SD Card to SATA adapter board and put a fake SD card in that. I have an SD to laptop IDE board that I use in an old laptop and they work quite decently with cheap but legit cards.
It would perform much much worse and the worst case, it can't be used as boot drive. I have a legit Sandisk Ultra 128GB SD card that is rated 90MB/s transfer speed, but even with that the speed drops to below 30MB/s when I copy anything larger than 250MB to the SD card
@@sihamhamda47Depends a bit on how the drive identifies. I have a stick that has the bit set to be seen as external hard drive, so it can be booted from. My other sticks got the removable media bit and can't be booted.
Absolutely love your videos and this is NOT a complaint, but when someone says "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't..." I don't know anymore what falls into that category... like sooooo many scams or unfounded claims are always going to be out there, but it's hard to tell what is within a good "deal" VS just a straight up scam. Thank you for all you do, but would it be possible to maybe put a few things that are legitimate or maybe make a video on the current prices for similar good products? I hope that makes sense. Have a great day!! ❤
It's rather easy. If it comes from China, it is a scam. There are no "hidden gems" or things to look for. They are all scams. Buy legit brands instead.
If a reputable well-known seller gives you a deep discount on a known good product, that's normally good. But with storage in particular that basically never happens, the discounts are maybe 20% tops, because it's so much of a commodity. Like you can't build a drive of a given capacity much cheaper than what one by any reputable brand costs, and overstock disappears quickly even with relatively small discounts, they don't have to struggle to clear the shelves.
@@SianaGearz I understand, but that's the hard part (for me at least) just trying to usually find a good deal on something and all. And I get it about "if it sounds too good to be true..." but that's also kinda silly because I think we've all gone into a Wal-Mart, Target, etc and end up finding something on sale/clearance for like 80 - 90% off and it's just because it didn't sell well or something so a legitimate item and all. I ain't trying to argue or anything.... just pointing stuff out and asking questions whenever I can. 😄 Have a wonderful day and all!
Give or take, do or die, there are time you gotta give things a go and remember which brands can work for you. Back then I used to trust Seagate for hard drives, then Western Digital. Basically things can change. Getting a 4TB SSD for $40 is obviously the one I should really avoid. If I can get a decent quality at a very good deal then yes I can go for as long as I am aware of detailed yet simple specifications.
Out of curiosity I decided to check the serial number printed on the drive on WD's site It corrosponds to a WD Green 240GB, but of an older model The warranty is still good until 17 Jan 2025
noting is done about this and the criminals get more advanced that circuit board looks high quality but the storage chips may be quality rejects. how exactly do they fake the capacity?
Proof: I was given three of these knockoffs (new-in-box) and they all failed. At first I thought it was the cable or interface on my laptop, but one also failed as a replacement in a PS4. Testing on a PC, one of them would randomly go offline and disappear from devmgr. At first I thought they were actually 4TB, but just terrible DRAMless controllers. Might open one up to verify what chipset it is, assuming identifiers aren't destroyed.
I've had walram's official store sell me two of these. They charged me what would be the normal price a 500gb ssd goes for on aliexpress, but they sent me that thing, except mine had 4 chips instead of 2 like yours. I've kept trying to use it while only filling about 64gb, but after some time its read/write speeds bsecame slower than 1mbps and I've decided to test my bbgun on one of them. If youfigure a way toflash the firmware, please do a video on it. I'd like to see the process. Since then, I've started to buy netac and netac only products.
Would love you to take this to its logical conclusion, Figure out how to flash appropriate firmware to the controller chip to restore this drive to functionality as a 110 GB SSD.
Really enjoyed the video. I was just as surprised by what was inside. Not because I know my stuff but your reaction was priceless. 😂 Learning new stuff all the time. ❤
*It's an obvious scam but people may still fall for it if they aren't too careful. Just be careful when buying stuff like this*
Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment in my iWish series!
I said I wouldn't. I know, but I bought this as a pure curiousity, simply because it uses SATA instead of USB.
Hope this was still entertaining for the first video of 2024 (Happy New Year also everyone!) and thank you
to the folks that did donate towards seeing this and other products on the channel. I appreciate you all so much :)
Let me know what you thought of this one down below!
TIMESTAMPS:
Introduction & Disclaimers: 0:00
The Listing, Pricing & Comparison: 1:44
Unboxing: 3:56
The 4TB Drive & Taking it apart: 4:58
Plugging it into a PC & First Issues: 6:17
Testing with H2TestW, More Issues etc: 7:24
Further Analysis of the Board: 8:40
HD Sentinel, AS SSD Benchmark, Second Test & Results: 9:50
Final Thoughts, Be Cautious & Rambling: 10:57
Thanking folks & Outro: 12:27
Be good people!
3:52 SATA M.2 Drives exist, they use different keying.
Also if u wanna get real SSD/HDD u buy hiksemi
I had to service a computer that was acting up. It had a drive very similar to this in it. The client had bought one and installed it as their boot drive. After getting windows installed, Steam, and a few games, it crashed exactly like that. People have fallen for it, and I'm just glad this client hadn't had enough time to put a lot of their life on it.
It's just hard to tell anymore and obvious to one person, may not be obvious to me, so I truly appreciate you taking the time for stuff like this! I'm still in the dark sometimes about what is good VS scam products and I really love trying to keep up with the good, bad, and ugly of computers, electronics, etc.... but it is HARD!!!
Thing is it's not that obvious to everyone. I've thanked you in another post for the heads up on this, I know I'm going to have to warn people of it and I doubt I'll be the only person who's seen this video and will be warning others. Good work mate, every time you point out what you might think is obvious, someone who doesn't think it's obvious finds out the easy way rather than the hard way, even if it's at 2 or 3 degrees of separation.
@@mitabpraga7487 Yeah, that's the problem. If you don't look closely at it, you won't spot it. I didn't see it myself until I pulled it from the system and looked closer. It's just close enough that it'll pass a cursory inspection.
Hilarious that they lasered off the markings from the controller chip but put the part number on the board silkscreen. Kinda makes me wonder if some of the laser-etched/sanded chips aren't blanked to hinder reverse engineering, but rather late-process reject chips from real manufacturers that get blanked on the production line to prevent resale as genuine but still make it into products in the "literally trash" end of the market.
Sounds about right!
Nice theory, haven't thought of that! I wonder if IC manufacturers would have to start physically breaking chips to avoid this happening, but then again dunno what they can do with rejects, in the industry nobody really throws anything away fully, it's all recycled in a way after all.
@Kalvinjj I know that some famous 80s home computer used a lot of semi-defective ran chips that were good enough for half the intended memory (obviously this memory lacks detail but I think I got what I did remember pretty correct)
I think you hit the nail on the head
@@catlover10192 That is pretty standard, or was some years ago. Fabs would have one production line, and test the chips before etching, sort them based on working capacity and/or speed and then etch, and sell as different model number based on what they tested OK as.
A few years back when a drive like this was $65 I found a 512GB Lexar SSD on Amazon for $35 shipped. I thought it was too good to be true but it was Amazon so I knew i'd get my money back and went for it. Turns out it was 100% legit and someone was dropping stock in a liquidation sale. I should have bought 10 of them. You win some. You lose some. I still use that drive to this very day as a test drive for PCs I assemble. And it still runs like a champ.
Oh wow that's actually a crazy story. You really got a bargain with this one and it encourages me to possibly try and get a drive using this method. However, I would only recommend to those who actually know how to test these drives and wouldn't put anything important on them even if they show up okay
@@RMED24it's always fun to do these things, but I like to keep in mind that it's more about the hobby than it is getting a good value. After all, the time spent making sure a drive is legit and works well could be spent on more profitable endeavors, and then you can use that extra money to buy reliable, warrantied drives!
Meanwhile I tried a 2 TB SSD some days ago on Amazon, normal price - and it was a scam. Amazon is just crap they simply don't push out companies that scam...
Thanks for good videos ❤
I appreciate that! Thank you :)
I don't know why, but even after all the storage device videos I've seen you make I still love watching this stuff. It's just fun seeing the different lengths they go to to make these things.
It is nice to know what is there so that we can avoid buying them
You would rather love selling those
I was so glad to hear that you do file complaints and try to get your money back. Thanks for what you do!
If I *can* buy an SSD that gives me better "security Sex" then I WILL buy that SSD.
I'd pay 40 bucks for that! 😃
I bought a 64GB flash drive, but it only had 128MB. I modified the firmware and now I have a 128MB flash drive. 😅
I have a 32mb sd card
My smallest is a 64MB MMC
@@holycrapski OK, that's cool. Mine is from an old, long lost camera and just sits in my desk drawer XD
Yeah, I'm divided on those. On one hand you got a drive that works at a price appropriate for the size, on the other hand you still gave the scammer money.
Of course unless you got your money back. Seen that with faked graphics cards. Flash them back to what they actually are, make a claim to get the money back, enjoy a free low-end backup card.
@@Ametisti 512 KB pcmcia card...
Congratulations on the enlightening video, I bought a HD SSD very similar to the one in the video promising to be 2 TB, but when I went to use it, I discovered that despite showing the capacity of 2 TB in Windows, it crashed whenever the amount of data exceeded 120 GB , the internal structure of my equipment is exactly the same as shown in the video. Thank you very much for clarifying our doubts.
I see smoorez, I click.
Me too
And me
Such a simple thing to do
Indeed
True.
Could this be defective device 'recycling'? Because why would they do any extra effort for a scam product? It realistically won't take long for a buyer of a 4 TB drive to realize it's rotten. They could just as well shipped a case with no PCB in it.
And why remove the controller labeling? Some kind of serial number traceability?
Serial no but there's a batch identification on ICs indeed - week and year code, facility code and some top secret rolling codes. If you have one device, you might not know exactly but if you have a few dozen, the IC manufacturer and counterfeit experts can trace them.
These obviously scam tech items are a guilty pleasure to watch. We all know its bullshit but seeing the stuff these scammers do to make it seem legit is so interesting
Inevitable, I suppose. Thanks for the video, one more thing to warn my clients about. Especially the guy who 2 years ago gave me a €40 "1TB" flash drive to back up his stuff to, the guy who last year gave me a €50 "4TB" USB SSD for the purpose and the guy who I just know would get one of these tomorrow.
It's the usual "If it's too good to be true" situation.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosAbsolutely, but it can be a tough job telling some people that. Tell them to look at the general retail price of a 4TB SSD and some will just think the RP is a ripoff if they can get it for a quarter of that elsewhere. The flash drive guy, when I told him the bad news, told me he'd bought it off Amazon "so it must be ok" (I quote verbatim there), and took his flash drive to another techie saying I was trying to rip him off for the retail price of a 1 TB HDD and USB case. And that's despite the fact that I'm just a techie, I don't actually sell stuff...
The program teracopy can verify data you copy to a drive.
It will show data errors.
I recently bought a kodak branded 128GB ssd off aliexpress for £3. Interestingly, the pcb looks very similar to this one, the controller is also a realtek, and the flash chips also appear to have had the markings removed, though the difference is that the advertised capacity actually comes up in the testing. Not sure about the reliability as I know the chips might be used/low quality, but since I use it in my test PC with a throwaway Windows install for plugging in and testing random things, I don't really care if it suddenly dies.
A couple of years ago, I fell for this basic scam on a 1TB drive from an ebay seller. In my case, the usable capacity was something just north of 64GB. I ended up finding a flashing tool on a Russian site that let me flash it to be a 64GB drive. I only use it for light duty, but it seems to operate with no issues.
I wish there was a way to re-flash the card back to being recognized as 120GB. If it worked as intended, it might actually be useful rather than just being E-waste.
there is, he went over it
You can its not that hard, you do it when you format it!
@@endurofurry I'm not so sure of it, because a 256GB SD card i got from Temu (as a christmas gift, no less) became unreadable after i tried to format it fully. It just broke 75% into the process, lagged my PC and was unrecognized afterwards.
Only with a recovery software i could even look at the thing as it popped in and out of existance, which is when i found out it was a spoofed SD card with stats written in by hand, but nothing i could do made it readable or able to be formatted.
@@DarkestVampire92 maybe a different brand, i was talking about the ones used in this video. i personally have a couple. i buy them here and there for cheap boot drives for testing rigs and file transfers. to freinds as im not worried about getting it back. i even have one in the pc that just runs crome and VLC for media veiwing. its been in there for over 3 years and it runs 24 hours a day with no isues. My only thing is the morality of buying these in the first place and suporting the scam even know i know what im getting.
Seems like a lot of work to recover 10GB. Just use it as a 110 GB drive. Create a 110 GB partition and you should be able to avoid the "crash" part of the drive.
Skip the rambling?
The rambling is why I’m here 😂👌🏼👍🏼❤️
Yay, another SMOOREZ video, this made my day better😊
5:15: So many fake certificates. I doubt that the CE sign is real. And I don't think that this had a safety inspection by TÜV Rheinland, either.
Security sex is fairly new technology, that's impressive tech.
It's where different security protocols come together. Two become one and all that. :)
@@supergeekjay Me: DoH! She: ssh
Smoorez is a real gem. I binged ashens channel to bits and now I’m enjoying everything smoorez posts. Thank you for existing!
Thnx for the test program G!
If the controller is a standard part the flashing tool is likely available somewhere on the internet probably on some sketchy looking russian site for hardware hackers. The flashing tool will let you specify the flash chip configuration among other internal parameters and even the sata model number you want the device to appear as to the computer.
I'm OK with you doing more storage vids; go nuts...I'll watch.
Well said man. Always be cautious on what u buying.
I would try to make a 96 GB partition and try the H2TestW again (multiple times) - either it will work, or not, depends on where the capacity was faked and how resilient is the wear levelling. If it will work, it should just report lot of damaged cells (above capacity), as long as the untrimmed space stays smaller than the total NAND capacity.
Thank you for clearing up this scam!
My guess is that there are thousands of failed SSD's that are only partially usable and they are being sold for high capacity drives for a low price. Those people probably make enormous profits on these drives.
Use the current version of the HDS, otherwise that old version from 2015 does not recognize new ssds correctly.
Because of this shows 80% for the performance.
I would not trust a no-name SSD of questionable origin and quality to store anything, no matter how cheap.
Beware even if this drive could be flashed back to its true capacity the chips used for storage are often old ones ripped from used drives.
So they would soon fail anyhow.
The scammers are also doing this with drives that are actually the rated capacity (ie a 4 TB that is 4 TB) but often have multiple makes/models of heavily used chips on a single board.
Certainly wouldn't trust any data to them!
It's the same as some scam companies selling old hard drives as new by wiping the SMART data and re-labelling (SONNICS is a company on eBay that do this). They look perfectly new until you hit errors.
I bought a 2TB micro sd for 6 bucks once for kicks. It was a super plain 32GB one with a poorly made samsung looking thin sheet of plastic glued on top of it, and glued as in i can see the disgusting spilled glue scraped away on the sides lol. It failed past 32GB. It had a write speed of 7MB's iirc, and read of 27. told ali, and got my money back, and that store terminated.
SSDs will usually not perform as well in a USB enclosure vs SATA in AHCI mode. 550 Meg/second is about the best to expect in any case, you never hit the top speed likely to latency in command processing and data fetching etc. I've had 2 people recently tell me they got amazing deals on 2 and 4 TB USB flashdrives and I've replied with the bad news that it's 99.9% chance they've been scammed and it's just a smaller drive with a controller hack to make it look bigger.
Unless maybe they got the Team Group QX. The 4tb went on sale for something like $170 USD in some region. I am under the impression that they have overstock of 2.5 ssd because a lot of people get Nvme drive nowadays.
@@leucome On the last Amazon Prime Day 2023 in Germany, Amazon had 4TB Transcend 2.5-inch SSDs on offer for 151 euros and 4TB Samsung 870 EVO 2.5-inch for 172 euros.
These scam ssd's are still all over Aliexpress. Why does Ali allow companies to sell them when its obviously a total rip off?
When I first saw this I thought "for that price you can get a real 1TB SSD", and then after he showed the price of the real one, I double checked and WOW have the prices gone up, nearly double on the low end in just a couple months.
I enjoy getting fake storage devices in my hands because it's super fun when it's possible for me to re-flash firmware and change the "real" name of the drives that the computer sees.
This drive could be some fun if it was a bit cheaper, would love to see if those extra NAND spots work.
The extra locations could be populated but if you're going to do that then just get one of the SSD pcbs that dosdude designed and make your own proper drive with known good parts.
a small board in an enclosure is to be expected in ssd.
they could make enclosure half size but there would be no way to mount and secure it to prevent it moving.
the real size factor scam comes from when they claim hundreds of tb in the same dimensions witch can come from a sd card paralleling card that can take several sd cards and adapt them to sata and raid them into 1 big size.
Hoofddorp is next to the Amsterdam airport where many giant companies have shell offices inside of The Netherlands for low tax reasons. This address points to one of these random office building with tons of international businesses that only collect mail from there and nobody is working.
ANY idiot can use fake stickers and say, its made in xx country
it is weird how 8 months ago, i bought the 4tb ssd... yes, sata not m.2(though, they were literally same priced at the time for same capacity) on amazon for 180 british pounds.
how exactly did it go up in price? i went for 870 evo. almost half a year later for old tech, i'm expected to pay 220 or about 20% more? for aging tech?
samsung ssd's suck a nut...
4tb samsung sata ssd equaled to 3.27tb on windows, before the OP.
It should go down in price, with the advance of technology. I brought brands like goldenfir, kingspec with 940GB in aliexpress for less than $50, filled them with my files and working fine for now.
@@startreck9204 it should've... yet it went up...
annoying.
I have the same HP laptop as you, but the core i7 model. Now thats pretty cool
i saw that ssd, but i never thought about it.Thank you for verifying the ssd
Funny, you can get also all parts and tools to make your own fake SSD drives! 😂
Great content, and editing, wishing you get a ton more subbers in 2024! :D
3:00 you missed the best part. 'no moving parts' but with anti-vibration support that a SSD doesn't need haha!
I did a bit more searching and from the details that others have posted of what looks like the same drive, those are Micron B17A 512Gbit (64GB) 64L 3D TLC flashes, reject quality (below SpecTek rebrand) based on their markings being crossed out. The bright side is that you might be able to reflash this SSD firmware to use them in SLC mode, getting a ~40GB SLC SSD that is far less likely to lose data, which for $40 is... not bad.
I remember seeing these on amazon, and ebay a little while ago, before a lot of them got pulled down, but it's surprising how common these kind of scams are.
I did manage to snag a 2TB TLC Lexar SATA drive (LNS100-2TRBNA) directly from Amazon US for $62 USD this summer so the scam prices aren't shit honkingly insane, but still too good to be true.
They tried hard to imitate a WD, how nice
So tired of scammers... I got a 1tb flash drive for Christmas that was bought because people don't know... F3 probe in linux tells me its a 512 gb but it does this same data loss at like 110 gb..... Only thing I want from scammers is phone calls as I will waste their time as long as I can.... Its kinda enjoyable listening to them get frustrated....lol
WD does have an office in Hoofddorp but NOT on that address.
Also, the street name on that SSD is spelled wrong (like so many other things)
As Del Boy once said, What are you expecting for 40 dollars? LOL
With the 4 NAND chips it may reach the 500 MB/S
A couple months ago I shut down my desktop and the next day it wasn't even beeping or showing the BIOS/POST screen, it was turning itself off after 4 or 5 seconds as if something was really bad, I was already thinking about a fried VRM but in the end the culprit was a 480GB Intel Enterprise class SATA SSD.
I wasn't aware a SATA drive could prevent a motherboard from booting at all. It also prevented USB to SATA enclosures and converters from being detected.
I wonder, that sounds like a possible MLCC short fault, a pretty easy repair if it's that. Shunting something hard, not just not responding properly.
@@SianaGearz It could be but I scrapped the drive... It was an Intel drive with a Dell "Enterprise Class" logo, I haven't looked at what Dell means by that, but I have many WD Green hard drives and some that have around 60k hours started to report reallocated sectors but I didn't lose any data, all of the unstable sectors were recoverable and I was able to make backups, on the other hand I had a pair of WD Gold "Enterprise Class" and both died suddenly around 20k hours without reporting any SMART errors before...
So by "Enterprise Class" it seems to me they mean overpriced drives for businesses that have backup tape drives instead of higher quality drives 🙄
I got caught with this a few years ago. Was a 1tb for $25. Weird part was it’s actually a real ssd. Just not a 1tb ssd was a 120gb ssd. They also have an nvme 1tb scam drive too that’s the same thing. I installed windows on it. The second it reached capacity it did nothing but blue screen and couldn’t be used anymore. Real size was 64gb
SATA SSD scams? That's a new one.
First time viewing one of your videos. Time stamps etc. made it fun to watch. Imo the bright yellow/blue text in your video thumbnails are hurting your views. Maybe 10 years ago they wouldn't be mistaken for spam/AI content but nowadays I think people tend to stay away from those.
I remember when I had a PSP and bought a memory stick from Amazon that turned out to be a fake. Since then I absolutely will not buy any storage device from any store except the brand manufacturer or a reputable provider. And Amazon, Aliexpress and their ilk are not reputable providers given that they're making money from this scam and the number of refunds they eventually issue must be a tiny fraction of the cash they rake in. It's not even worth the grief.
Could you show the output of a program called ValiDrive on one of these fake drives?
Computers, "security sex" SSDs...Rule 34?
Great vid! Plot twist: These companies now subsist entirely on selling crapware to YouTubuers for content creation!
12:32 hmmm suika ibuki seems to be a rather peculiar name indeed :,D
she donates for more drinking games
Interesting. Are these ever recoverable? Like, being able to make them work in their original capacity at least? Not that it would be desirable, but just as an exercise.
Probably can cut off the chip feeding the fake info but you'd have to locate it to do so
If you just create a partition of the correct size, it should work.
@@moth.monster That is a good point.
@@moth.monster No, it doesn't work, since the full flash capacity is still aliased several times, so when flash controller writes to one flash location, it actually pops up in a bunch of repeat locations. The full drive capacity will be used for wear levelling. You really need to reprogram it for actual flash capacity.
SATA? that's from dinosaur era man... lol! i was in middle school "Elementary"....it's good that it was brought up. Do you have any of those "FLOPPY DISK"? lol!
Hope you've got solid security on your network with installing dodgy Chinese storage devices onto any of your machines.
Laser etched/removed, not sanding for part number & text removal.
These realtek chipsets on this board is actually not so bad, i had a legitimate 120gb one with Intel TLC NAND that actually works great. Assuming these suspiciously sourced NAND chips arent full of bad blocks, the firmware could be easily modified to appear as a real 120gb SSD
But it's still overpriced. There's any number of reputable Chinese brands which will give you a genuine 500G SSD for less, and 120/240 capacity cost barely nothing, people don't buy them much. I remember i bought a Kingspec i don't know 32 or 64 which was enough to upgrade a first gen Atom netbook to Linux, nearly 10 years ago now, and it cost me barely nothing, and that company is still around; major companies simply didn't feel it was worth it to them to make such a price reduced product, and yeah it's a real SSD, not some weird contraption. Since then of course several other decent Chinese brands popped up - wouldn't choose them over Crucial for my PC, ultimately at comparable specs and capacities the price difference isn't at all large, but they're fair enough to just fill out your devices with necessities.
Last year, I saw a ITB internal SSD for $20 on Amazon. It was tempting. :-)
Smoorez without the gooey mess. Just scam busting goodness. 💯😊
As sketchy are things are now... should we be worried that a drive can re-write UEFI, making the system forever-vulnerable?
Thanks for the video!
Similar scam has been going on with LTO tapes. You can buy a 15TB tape and it only has 6TB capacity!!! How can they get away with that. Aliexpress sellers should add "4TB compressed" with very small letters, maybe.
Aliexpress is great if you are willing to think.
5:43 HELLOOOORRRRRRRRR
TEMU unboxing videos is the new hot sauce.
Just like USB drives, you shouldn't ever plug a scam SSD, just in case you have another kind of "surprise"...
Especially not into any system with data you want to keep. Better have a dedicated scamcheck system.
Those laser scrubbed markings are such a Chinese classic, always the same.
The funniest is that they do it with any form of scam, including IP theft products they clone out of good products, so that other's won't reverse engineer their own clones.
So yes, they steal, but don't want you stealing back. THAT'S wrong!
9:01; Is this an ad? I'm not sure if it's "the user of Vertyanov Devices"
No not an ad, just where I found the info for the board and all that.
Wondering if they could've used an SD Card to SATA adapter board and put a fake SD card in that. I have an SD to laptop IDE board that I use in an old laptop and they work quite decently with cheap but legit cards.
It would perform much much worse and the worst case, it can't be used as boot drive. I have a legit Sandisk Ultra 128GB SD card that is rated 90MB/s transfer speed, but even with that the speed drops to below 30MB/s when I copy anything larger than 250MB to the SD card
@@sihamhamda47Depends a bit on how the drive identifies. I have a stick that has the bit set to be seen as external hard drive, so it can be booted from. My other sticks got the removable media bit and can't be booted.
That is how most of these fake SSD's work actually. When you pop them open,. you usually see an SD card with a SATA adapter connected to it.
Happy New year🎉
the profit margin in scamming people is much higher than in doing legitimate business
Absolutely love your videos and this is NOT a complaint, but when someone says "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't..." I don't know anymore what falls into that category... like sooooo many scams or unfounded claims are always going to be out there, but it's hard to tell what is within a good "deal" VS just a straight up scam. Thank you for all you do, but would it be possible to maybe put a few things that are legitimate or maybe make a video on the current prices for similar good products? I hope that makes sense. Have a great day!! ❤
It's rather easy. If it comes from China, it is a scam. There are no "hidden gems" or things to look for. They are all scams. Buy legit brands instead.
If a reputable well-known seller gives you a deep discount on a known good product, that's normally good. But with storage in particular that basically never happens, the discounts are maybe 20% tops, because it's so much of a commodity. Like you can't build a drive of a given capacity much cheaper than what one by any reputable brand costs, and overstock disappears quickly even with relatively small discounts, they don't have to struggle to clear the shelves.
@@SianaGearz I understand, but that's the hard part (for me at least) just trying to usually find a good deal on something and all. And I get it about "if it sounds too good to be true..." but that's also kinda silly because I think we've all gone into a Wal-Mart, Target, etc and end up finding something on sale/clearance for like 80 - 90% off and it's just because it didn't sell well or something so a legitimate item and all. I ain't trying to argue or anything.... just pointing stuff out and asking questions whenever I can. 😄 Have a wonderful day and all!
Give or take, do or die, there are time you gotta give things a go and remember which brands can work for you. Back then I used to trust Seagate for hard drives, then Western Digital. Basically things can change. Getting a 4TB SSD for $40 is obviously the one I should really avoid. If I can get a decent quality at a very good deal then yes I can go for as long as I am aware of detailed yet simple specifications.
Out of curiosity I decided to check the serial number printed on the drive on WD's site
It corrosponds to a WD Green 240GB, but of an older model
The warranty is still good until 17 Jan 2025
The greatest SMOOREZisian that has ever lived.
Have you ever done a return ? Just to see how they react and what they say?
I was expecting the micro sd setup inside. Thanks for the entertainment
Got an STL file for the Smoorez logo because it's awesome and i want to print it
Same as a "SAMSUNG 2TB" from eBay. The disk after 112 GB died completely. No format recovery was possible. At least I got a full refund.
The warning message at the top can still be cropped out 😂
Didn't expect a real ssd at all
3.45: they are both sata drives, one is just compatible with m.2 slot on your mobo
noting is done about this and the criminals get more advanced
that circuit board looks high quality
but the storage chips may be quality rejects.
how exactly do they fake the capacity?
controller
stealing leads to where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
Proof: I was given three of these knockoffs (new-in-box) and they all failed. At first I thought it was the cable or interface on my laptop, but one also failed as a replacement in a PS4. Testing on a PC, one of them would randomly go offline and disappear from devmgr. At first I thought they were actually 4TB, but just terrible DRAMless controllers. Might open one up to verify what chipset it is, assuming identifiers aren't destroyed.
Thank you! I found these on aliexpress as well but couldn't see how their scam works. Now I know.
$40 for 120gb hahahahahahaha
Clever logo. Nice. Subtle "DOOM"
I've had walram's official store sell me two of these. They charged me what would be the normal price a 500gb ssd goes for on aliexpress, but they sent me that thing, except mine had 4 chips instead of 2 like yours.
I've kept trying to use it while only filling about 64gb, but after some time its read/write speeds bsecame slower than 1mbps and I've decided to test my bbgun on one of them.
If youfigure a way toflash the firmware, please do a video on it. I'd like to see the process.
Since then, I've started to buy netac and netac only products.
Would love you to take this to its logical conclusion, Figure out how to flash appropriate firmware to the controller chip to restore this drive to functionality as a 110 GB SSD.
Really enjoyed the video. I was just as surprised by what was inside. Not because I know my stuff but your reaction was priceless. 😂
Learning new stuff all the time. ❤
finally, the only way tech nerds can get laid