@ThioJoe : Great job showing ValiDrive! (which I wrote) I think I'll link to this video from the program's home page since many people would appreciate seeing it go! Thanks! :) And very slick additional graphics to clearly show what's going on. Very nice!
Thanks for not bloating your software like people do nowadays. Even though you're going quite low with MASM here. Can you verify if ValiDrive would also detect fake drives that use a modulo? From what I've read it wouldn't... so h2testw or f3 on Linux are still the only (slow) option for these to be sure. Basically the drives use a modulo like 64 GB for real 64 GB capacity, and use that on every positioning on the drive. So one can actually write at 1 TB of an 2 TB drive and read the data back ok. Just that older data at the beginning of the drive is overwritten by that. I've heard some drives don't even store the real memory at position 0 but somewhere higher up. (though that might have been the persons fault when they tried to "fix" the drive via partitioning.)
Great to see you here, Steve! Another awesome piece of software, along with SpinRite and of course the DNS Benchmark. Grateful to still have you developing these applications and catch you and Leo on the next Security Now podcast!
Can we take a moment to appreciate that this is a fully functional windows application that isn’t dependent on any installed runtimes and it’s 95KB. Steve Gibson writes all his utilities in assembler.
ooooh thats pretty cool, most applications go "ooh hey you need to install this and that to run me" or "i m missing verys-pecific-dllfile-you-need-to-google-to-know-what-it-belongs-to.dll" the second one being very very annoying
The reason for forcing the user to re-plug the drive may be a sanity check so the user can't test anything but the drive they intended. Also the program sounds like it'll be great for finding out if a drive is dying, how useful! :D
I have no idea if this is true but an idea I had with this is that the validator may hook into the drive while it is interfacing with the operating system, before the driver is loaded and set, a way to gather information uncorrupted by lies that would already be in place when the drive is fully initialized. But again, might be techno garbo.
It might be a safety check to prevent the user from scanning the system drive. Only looking for newly inserted drives would be a quick and easy way to accomplish that.
Might have been a better idea to contact Steve Gibson and either have him in your video or have him explain things to you, so you can explain them properly (like the reason that some drives are fast and some drives scan more slowly). Monochrome view is for people who are colour blind. The report saves in RTF format, so you can take a screenshot of that. I do like your suggestion to be able to have the window bigger, by perhaps putting a maximize button in the software.
@@ThioJoe No argument from me. It would have been nice to have that. I was in a rush to get back to finishing the update to SpinRite, so I was trying to 'steal' as little time as possible. :)
I learned something new! I didn't realize that some flash drives could be fake. I have a bunch of them. I'm guessing the really cheap ones that I have will be fake. Thanks for the info!!!
I bought Patriot flash drives off of Amazon and they turned out to be fake. Label was normal, no errors. But they had so little space. The guy that made that software is doing the world a favor.
Years ago I bought some 'large capacity' USB drives and SD cards on eBay. They weren't that big in modern terms, all around 350 to 500 GB. Eventually I tried copying some large videos to one of them and quickly discovered it was garbage. Couldn't store more than about 4GB. So I then ran the same test on the other stuff. Quickly discovered they were all garbage. But the good news is, eBay refunded me for ALL of them. So I learned something important and, at the same time, my only actual loss was just a few hours of my time. So it's probably a stretch to claim flash drives are MOSTLY fake. But it certainly tells us we need to be wary, especially of deals that sound too good to be true. Does anyone know if Amazon will similarly issue refunds if the product is clearly a scam?
Monochrome mode is likely for colorblindness if you are colorblind in certain ways you wouldn't be able to read that color chart at all, I am not colorblind but I am glad they included it.
Thank you, so much, for highlighting this program! I didn't even realize this was a problem, and had just purchased a few new flash drives. Happy to say, all but one was valid! The distributer for that one is getting a nastygram!
Cheers - I'll give that a whirl. I don't think it's confined to just the cheap USB drives on Amazon, Ebay etc. I reckon I've got one from Sandisk as well. I use it for music in the car. But sometimes when you write to it, as you said it writes the data but when you go to play songs (data) from it, they're incomplete.
These fake USB capacity scams bother me so much because they take what could otherwise be a fine enough 16 or 32 GB USB and immediately convert it into a non-functional piece of waste of money, material, and time.
If you need that much portable storage, an NVME drive and a case is cheap. I think my 1TB setup was around $80 when I bought it. Sabrent USB C case $23 and SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB $70. (I think there drive was cheaper When I bought it)
Validrive verified my drive was fake... supposed to be 2TB but actually 3GB... gutted out of pocket now and can't afford another one. Thanks for the vid.
Well I fell for one of these, I bought a 2tg external drive, I did put stuff on it but nothing too big. I just saw this clip so downloaded ValDrive and tested this external, it turned out as you said to be only 69GB not 2TB. I bought it on eBay from China, there were lots advetised, some wil say I should have known it wasn't 2TB, but with technology moving the way it does why shouldn't it be. Thing is when you see something advertised, you can't say I'll take it home first and test it then I'll pay you if it works.
I've had one of these drives many years ago. Claimed to be 64GB but it was nowhere near that. When writing files it seem to just infinitely overwrite existing data until "complete" but of course was always corrupted. Most of the tools I used where badly designed or simply didn't work to test.
well the "main" drive attached to my keys actually has more than half its capacity filled and has been able to read the files so no, its not fake. its also from a reputable brand and purchased at the biggest electronics shop chain in the country.
Bought that same drive you tested a month ago and returned it 3 days later, literally corrupted the copied files and couldnt remove them without formatting.
The Monochrome Map is intentend for the colorblind people. Although most can still see that the colors as different, with different shades, it would be better for them if the difference is more noticeable
Steve is nearly 70 years old and has been coding in x86 assembler for 40 years continually producing the SpinRite drive checking software since the early 80s. He also publishes Security Now the podcast which has been going for nearly 20 years too. That could explain the old timey style of the software, and thats why the EXE size is so small - its hand coded assembler.
Been listening to you and Leo since episode 1 - you actually helped me get a career in podcasting and Im 45 and feel half that age too! :) All the best Steve! - @@SGgrc
The Chief Executive Officer of Amazon should do something about it because they wouldn't want the company to be filled with negative reviews and other crap that could harm the company.
Wow - just realized 3 USBs I have are fake and I am getting my money back from the merchant as we speak - you literally just saved me like 50$ because of this video - THANK YOU
I agree ... but I also think that it's part of the strategy, because they don't calculate on digital well educated people on actually buying their drives but your average Joes and Josefines, which think they got a real bargain and then when they eventually find out the drive failed they think it's defective "bad luck" but nothing more serious which combined with the low price just makes them just take the loss instead of demanding a refund and therefore giving the scammers little to no fuss about it.
I think that, in a lot of cases, scammers don't try too hard to hide the fact that it's a scam so that the knowledgeable and the sceptical will pass on by and they'll only hit their target more gullible mark. Makes for less scamming effort on their part.
You're overestimating how intelligent the average consumer is. Don't forget that countless people fall for scams where you have a guy telling you to mail them Google Play gift cards to the "IRS" and countless others of the sort. Most non-tech people would have no idea what a 2TB drive should be priced at.
It's actually their tactic, you aka buyer will less likely to get "angry" if you buy fake with cheaper price, it's like their way of telling you that this is fake and if you buy it then you know you buy a bad quality product and has no reason to get angry to me.
@@olestas true. Most comments seem positive. 1tb usb 2.0 with 4mb/s reads. Sheesh. Its mostly non computer people too. When they realize that their data is gonna its gonna be tough
I got a fake USB stick long ago. Ever since then, I've only bought flash memory devices with brands I recognize and only from reputable dealers less likely to end up with counterfeits. Never had a bad one since.
I've gotten some flash drives from Aliexpress for cheap. Including the Kingston ones. To no suprise, non-kingston ones are almost all fake, few ones are actually good. All Kingston ones are suprisingly good, though.
I actually used the old german software back in the day that filled the drive up to see how much it could write. Yes it took ages to do but called out a "Samsung" micro SD card I got on eBay back in the day. Now I only buy from Samsung's Amazon store directly. It looked authentic in every way
As I've stated in a comment on another video, I had that happen to me back in 2016 while I was on a cruise. I was given a supposed 128GB MicroSD card for Christmas 2015 to use in my digital camera for taking pictures during the cruise. I did not know that the family member who bought it, bought it from Ebay for $10. The reason I didn't know is because they wanted it to be a surprise. Well, in a nutshell, when the cruise ship was docked in Florida (we were going to the Bahamas), I took over 200+ pictures with my digital camera and when I went to view them on my camera, because I didn't have a laptop with me, I discovered that almost ALL of those Florida pictures were completely lost FOREVER and I was beyond angry when that happened. I will NEVER purchase ANY type of storage device from Amazon or any other website like that, unless it is cloud storage, I will go to a physical store to buy it outright.
Don't trust cloud storage either - not in lieu of a physical backup! Apart from the problems associated with storing files in the cloud, you will not have all of your files physically on your system, and some programs, especially utility programs for backing up and renaming files, will not see files that are not physically on your drive. Also, there are occasionally back-sync issues, when it syncs the wrong way. This is more likely if you have more than one computer using the same cloud storage; often the latest version of a file on your computer will get replaced by an older version that was, for example, recently saved on a different computer or even deleted from another computer.
That sucks :( I've tried something similar like that. After moving my photos from my camera to a USB, many of the files got corrupted even though it looked they weren't gone. I bought a cheap USB on Aliexpress so it's my fault for not thinking straight. But what about a trusted brand that sell on Amazon as well as in physical stores? I've bought SanDisk USBs in physical stores and on their official Amazon page too and I've never experienced any problems
I allways destroy everything on a disk or stick and start with partitioning, formatting and dumping random data onto it, until its space runs over. This is the prove that it's working correct.
Atomic Shrimp did a video on fake SD cards the other day, reported it to Amazon (where he got it), and left a 1 star review with proof. Amazon decided to delete his comment and scold him in an email.
I had no idea back in 2008 that fake drives existed. I was on holiday in Philippines, my phone memory was getting near full, there was tons of stuff on it not just holiday stuff. I went into a proper looking electronic store and bought a m2 drive. Put it in the phone, did the set up on screen. My mistake was instead of copying to the new card I just did a transfer of files. It seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, progress bar was moving. When it got to the end my photo album in the phone was empty, but sadly the memory card was also empty. Lost a lot of work related stuff and at the time some precious memories of the holiday
The reason for having a non-color dependent chart in the report, is that about 10% of men are red-green colorblind. Confronted with that chart you showed, my husband would say that either the drive is all good, or all fake.
This is great, thanks Joe. I recently bought a Samsung 128 GB flash drive and just tested it using Vali Drive, and fortunately it's a genuine 128 GB. The test was very fast. I bought this drive from Micro Center so I wasn't really worried about it being fake but I certainly would hesitate buying one off eBay or Amazon at this point.
I still remember paying 125$ for a 32GB thumbdrive, turned out to be fake. Because of that, I went back to 4.7GB DVD which I am still using to this day. Also the monochrome map is really good, my father can't see color at all so it is really helpful for people like him.
I've only ever had one fake drive in my possession. It did this weird thing where the writes basically went to a looping queue, so every write was successful and up to the real size of the drive could be read back accurately. It was super annoying when I had some data and the only part left intact was the end of it.
Buying fake drives is a great way to get FREE thumb drives. I bought 10x 64GB drives from a seller some years ago and they turned out to be 8GB. I actually wanted 8GB and I knew they were fake so after filing a claim and getting a full refund I got 10x FREE 8GB thumb drives LOL! Then just partition the drive to the real size and leave the remaining part unformatted and they work great!
You bought the exact one I got. I also bought a different 1TB flash drive before that one. The first one I got turned out to be 8GB. I figured it was just defective because it wouldn't play any videos I put on it. So I got the one you featured in your video. I am confident it ruined my front facing USB drives it was that bad. I reported both fake drives/sellers to amazon and they responded by taking down my one star reviews I left to warn other shoppers. But amazon then deleted my review. I unloaded righteous indignation on them through an online chat after they took down my "verified purchase" review. They ended up putting my review back up after I blasted them for the decision. But I don't really care my review is back up. The fake flash drive is still for sale. Amazon doesn't give two squirts of a rat's butt that people are being conned on these things. I guess they figure as long as they allow returns and refunds, their customers should clap and be happy like beached seals and not care they allow scammers to proliferate on their website.
Still, all these years later, I question your videos :) Is it real? Is this true? Even if it's something I KNOW you doing a video about it makes me question reality. Also, love your videos, old and young alike.
And yet I'm surprised people think something like ValiDrive is new... h2testw (or f3write on linux) is quite old by now.. (8+ years). I do like the quick test speed of ValiDrive, though h2testw is more thorough. Not sure if ValiDrive even detects fake sticks that just math mod 64 their storage... (if 64 is the real capacity) as you can actually write data at the 1.5 TB mark and also read it back. I thought this is how all fake drives work... I sadly don't have fake drives with me to check if ValiDrive would detect those... Given the authors description of it, it won't.
oh no...... I have just realized that I have brought a bunch of those flash drives on amazon a long time ago. and if they are fake then oh my I probably didn't know
The Amazon scam goes as follows. The fake seller will make a listing for an item that's completely different from a flash drive. One where $15-$30 is a realistic price for a legit one. They leave it that way for a while and let the good reviews come in, then, once they have enough good reviews, they change the listing to the fake flash drive.
I've been going straight to the Samsung store and buying my SSDs, USB flash drives, and memory cards there because I've lost trust in the third party sellers on eBay and Amazon. The price is a bit higher but I get legit stuff delivered to my door. Knock on wood.
I bought 4 really cheap flash drives from aliexpress from different sellers. They all claimed to be 2TB but in reality 1 was 32GB, 2 were 64GB and 1 was 128GB. I reported this fact to aliexpress and they issued full refund on all of them. So even if they are not 2TB as they claimed, I still got a bunch of free flash drives out of it.
If it's too good to be true, it usually is. I think educating people on how to spot scams would go a long way in combatting these grifts. Or Amazon etc. could take some responsibility for the crap that is sold via their platform but I'm not holding my breath.
Great looking utility. And given it's from the guy behind Spinrite you know it'll be good. I'd imagine the monochrome mode is for people with colour blindness.
The monochrome view is for people like me who can't see the difference between VALIDATED and WRITE ERROR. I appreciate the creator for the accommodation.
I tested and discovered two drives of two TB each really have 14 GB storage. Thank You for the video! I will be returning the drives and look forward to testing all future new drives.
I remember back in the day when I first buy a flash drive it was 10-15$ for a 2GB storage. And now I checked online store that were few months ago the price were crazy cheap like 5$ for a 2TB storage and I was like "Damn, so this is the future.." but when I check the review they all saying it was a fake storage, the real size were only like 5GB and then I go "Yup, this is the future of scamming".
Yea, I got done by this too. Price looked too good to be true, but I'm a sucker and I bought it anyway. At least now I can prove it's fake and hopefully get my money back.
Too bad we can't select a drive from the start. This issue is not only happening with thumb drives. It's also happening with sata drives, which makes it hard to attach after this app is started. Unless you place it in an external drive case.
Sadly these tools wont be seen by the vast majority of people who buy these drives. These are commonly bought by elderly people, because they see this price and that seems reasonable to them as things were indeed alot cheaper back then overall, and sellers know this. Amazon really needs to hire somebody to anonymously buy these drives and test them.
As long as Amazon do the bare minimum to combat them, they have no other incentive to do so. If it makes the news they can just put out a press statement and people will forget once the news cycle moves on. Many people will only buy through Amazon these days, and they've stamped out a lot of the competition with the free delivery on orders over a certain price, and the speed people are used to of anything sold or fulfilled by Amazon. I try to avoid them where possible these days (especially since they ended Smile, and often other retailers can have the same product cheaper) but I doubt most people would have that sort of self-control.
More to the point: Electronics are much cheaper now than they used to be. My first laptop, with a 210 (? sounds wrong) MB hard drive, cost three times as much as the much more powerful laptop i use now. (And this tablet cost one-eighth as much.) It's logical to assume that flash drives would similarly offer more for less money.
That was a great tip! I've been using Heise's flash drive tester, but that one is brute force, mow the lawn, solution and takes hours to crank through 400 GB of flash. Validrive finished in a couple of seconds. My hit rate on fake drives is about 33%, since I tend to buy cheap, and the cheap ones are more likely to be fake.
Thanks for this. Question : in such a case of detecting that the divice only has 64GB, is there a way to reset/rewrite the firmware or do anything to the USB so that we can use it just as that 64GB drive, rather than windows thinking its 2TB and nuking all the data while writing.
It wouldn't be possible or be really hard to rewrite the firmware. If it is an SD card, or some small capacity SSD connected to a USB adapter/controller, disconnect it from the controller adapter, buy a new adapter and connect the storage device to the new adapter. Most of the times there is a small capacity SD card which has normal firmware connected to a USB controller/adapter which is falsely reporting that information.
If you repartition it and set the partition size to the real size then even if you reformat it only the real part (the previously set partition) will be accessible.
Steve Gibson from Security Now! He is the star of the show! I'm a huge fan of him when it comes to anything security-related. And I know about ValiDrive even before I watch this video. :)
Thank you for this. I'd recently bought a few thumb drives to move some movies to my parents TV. Couldn't figure out why they werent working. Exactly like you said, the first one I tested was rated at 62GB, was sold as a 2.1TB and that's what the header says it is.
They cannot be fake if you bought it directly from the people that made them though.... Like Samsung for example. I bought my MicroSD Card for my Steam Deck for one directly from there Website not from a third party website. It was 100% legit. Always buy storage DIRECTLY from the manufacturer themselves not a third party website. I rather buy my drives directly from the makers themselves than a third party seller.
I had a 2tb thumbstick several years ago that I got for laughably cheap. The tool I used filled it up to test the storage space which somehow caused the drive itself to fail and it is no longer recognized when you plug it in. I wonder if this software would have been able to tell me how much it actually was. Steve Gibson is really good. Thanks for the video, love those channel
Steve Gibson (Spinrite) is a real pro and I would trust my data to him. He has been writing software since the DOS days, and he was an expert in hard drives back when you needed a controller card to use a drive. He also used to (and probably still does) program exclusively in assembly.
Yep, and not just thumb drives. There's a lot of fake external TB SSD drives that, if you open them up, contain just a 64GB micro SSD, plus some circuitry to spoof your OS into thinking it's 1 or more TB. They're usually very well sealed units, so you have to pretty much break the cases to get into them and check.
If it had the function of fixing the Flash Drive to its correct size it would be a great addition, or at least indicating how from Windows. A while ago I bought a fake USB stick that said 32 GB, and from Windows I reprogrammed it to a closer value.
Some drives probably have the size hard-coded, but your experience suggests that the size code may also be in flash memory and could be updated. But the question is, how?
@melkiorwiseman5234 @ALph4cro Sorry for the late. I honestly didn't remember how, but I found the commands I wrote in a text file. diskpart list disk select disk {number} clean create partition primary size={number of megabytes} select partition 1 active format fs=fat32 quick assign exit
@@katosnook That sadly only partially fixes the problem. The rest is still recognized as unallocated by the system and by the software that checks for fake capacities. I'm wondering if it's possible to reflash it to its true capacity but can't find any way to do it.
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@ThioJoe : Great job showing ValiDrive! (which I wrote) I think I'll link to this video from the program's home page since many people would appreciate seeing it go! Thanks! :) And very slick additional graphics to clearly show what's going on. Very nice!
Yea appreciate you creating the tool, it is extremely useful 👍
Thanks for not bloating your software like people do nowadays. Even though you're going quite low with MASM here.
Can you verify if ValiDrive would also detect fake drives that use a modulo? From what I've read it wouldn't... so h2testw or f3 on Linux are still the only (slow) option for these to be sure.
Basically the drives use a modulo like 64 GB for real 64 GB capacity, and use that on every positioning on the drive. So one can actually write at 1 TB of an 2 TB drive and read the data back ok. Just that older data at the beginning of the drive is overwritten by that.
I've heard some drives don't even store the real memory at position 0 but somewhere higher up. (though that might have been the persons fault when they tried to "fix" the drive via partitioning.)
Great to see you here, Steve! Another awesome piece of software, along with SpinRite and of course the DNS Benchmark. Grateful to still have you developing these applications and catch you and Leo on the next Security Now podcast!
what an awesome tool, simple and VERY effective
Your GRC site is a resource I've been using for a very long time. Thanks for your great work over the years!
Can we take a moment to appreciate that this is a fully functional windows application that isn’t dependent on any installed runtimes and it’s 95KB. Steve Gibson writes all his utilities in assembler.
And the majority of the file size is due to the digital signature (4 KiB) and high-res icons (56 KiB).
Yeah that's what happens when efficiency is a goal of the programmer instead of just throwing together some shitty electron app
@@mgord9518 ah, you’ve used Teams then.
ooooh thats pretty cool, most applications go "ooh hey you need to install this and that to run me" or "i m missing verys-pecific-dllfile-you-need-to-google-to-know-what-it-belongs-to.dll" the second one being very very annoying
@@JoducusKwak what kind of apps are you using that need you to do that? I haven't looked for specific DLLs in a LONG time.
The reason for forcing the user to re-plug the drive may be a sanity check so the user can't test anything but the drive they intended. Also the program sounds like it'll be great for finding out if a drive is dying, how useful! :D
I have no idea if this is true but an idea I had with this is that the validator may hook into the drive while it is interfacing with the operating system, before the driver is loaded and set, a way to gather information uncorrupted by lies that would already be in place when the drive is fully initialized. But again, might be techno garbo.
@@ShadowOfTheSPQR It wouldn't make a difference, the memory controller lies.
@@blunderingfool This would not be a matter of asking the memory controller anything.
Yea true, that was one thing i thought of
It might be a safety check to prevent the user from scanning the system drive. Only looking for newly inserted drives would be a quick and easy way to accomplish that.
Might have been a better idea to contact Steve Gibson and either have him in your video or have him explain things to you, so you can explain them properly (like the reason that some drives are fast and some drives scan more slowly). Monochrome view is for people who are colour blind. The report saves in RTF format, so you can take a screenshot of that. I do like your suggestion to be able to have the window bigger, by perhaps putting a maximize button in the software.
I like to be able to take a screenshot of the results within the software as an easy way to show context of what software created the results
@@ThioJoe No argument from me. It would have been nice to have that. I was in a rush to get back to finishing the update to SpinRite, so I was trying to 'steal' as little time as possible. :)
@@SGgrc OH! So glad to see you there! You are my favorite listener of Security Now! :D
Giant thumbs up! im sending this to a few mates who keep buying "crap" drives and saying "but it says this"
That's why I bought my drives only from retail stores with warranty.
I learned something new! I didn't realize that some flash drives could be fake. I have a bunch of them. I'm guessing the really cheap ones that I have will be fake. Thanks for the info!!!
I bought Patriot flash drives off of Amazon and they turned out to be fake. Label was normal, no errors. But they had so little space. The guy that made that software is doing the world a favor.
Years ago I bought some 'large capacity' USB drives and SD cards on eBay.
They weren't that big in modern terms, all around 350 to 500 GB. Eventually I tried copying some large videos to one of them and quickly discovered it was garbage. Couldn't store more than about 4GB. So I then ran the same test on the other stuff. Quickly discovered they were all garbage.
But the good news is, eBay refunded me for ALL of them. So I learned something important and, at the same time, my only actual loss was just a few hours of my time.
So it's probably a stretch to claim flash drives are MOSTLY fake. But it certainly tells us we need to be wary, especially of deals that sound too good to be true.
Does anyone know if Amazon will similarly issue refunds if the product is clearly a scam?
Monochrome mode is likely for colorblindness if you are colorblind in certain ways you wouldn't be able to read that color chart at all, I am not colorblind but I am glad they included it.
Thank you, so much, for highlighting this program! I didn't even realize this was a problem, and had just purchased a few new flash drives. Happy to say, all but one was valid! The distributer for that one is getting a nastygram!
This is why I only buy flash storage from reputable brands AND reputable sources (they have tons of counterfeits from the major brands as well)
Cheers - I'll give that a whirl. I don't think it's confined to just the cheap USB drives on Amazon, Ebay etc. I reckon I've got one from Sandisk as well. I use it for music in the car. But sometimes when you write to it, as you said it writes the data but when you go to play songs (data) from it, they're incomplete.
I don’t have fake drives because I know when something is too good to be true.
These fake USB capacity scams bother me so much because they take what could otherwise be a fine enough 16 or 32 GB USB and immediately convert it into a non-functional piece of waste of money, material, and time.
I once bought some new “brand” name USB drives that turned out to be fake. I tossed them but perhaps should have notified the manufacturer.
This is a really valuable stuff!💫✌🏼
Special thanks to you for bringing this towards us & special thanks to the inventor of the software 💙🙌🏼
If you need that much portable storage, an NVME drive and a case is cheap. I think my 1TB setup was around $80 when I bought it.
Sabrent USB C case $23 and SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB $70. (I think there drive was cheaper When I bought it)
I think the monochrome thing is there for colorblind friendliness.
Validrive verified my drive was fake... supposed to be 2TB but actually 3GB... gutted out of pocket now and can't afford another one. Thanks for the vid.
the monochrome is an accessibility feature for colorblind users
Well I fell for one of these, I bought a 2tg external drive, I did put stuff on it but nothing too big. I just saw this clip so downloaded ValDrive and tested this external, it turned out as you said to be only 69GB not 2TB. I bought it on eBay from China, there were lots advetised, some wil say I should have known it wasn't 2TB, but with technology moving the way it does why shouldn't it be.
Thing is when you see something advertised, you can't say I'll take it home first and test it then I'll pay you if it works.
I've had one of these drives many years ago. Claimed to be 64GB but it was nowhere near that. When writing files it seem to just infinitely overwrite existing data until "complete" but of course was always corrupted. Most of the tools I used where badly designed or simply didn't work to test.
If the price is too good to be true, it's not true. I don't understand how people fall into those scams.
well the "main" drive attached to my keys actually has more than half its capacity filled and has been able to read the files so no, its not fake. its also from a reputable brand and purchased at the biggest electronics shop chain in the country.
Bought that same drive you tested a month ago and returned it 3 days later, literally corrupted the copied files and couldnt remove them without formatting.
My question i; How Amazon allows vendors of fake hardware to sell stiff at the website?
Very good question, it's crazy
I only buy traditional brand flash storage, mostly Samsung. Seems to work for me.
Same
This is good tool. You cane evn use it if your drive maybe have bad sector.
Too many people are bamboozled into buying these fake stuff. A fool and his money are soon parted.
thank you for the program i checked my 512 gb flash usb 3.0 stick and it was fake only 64 gb in total, that sucks.
Thank you I will test this if it works 👍
The Monochrome Map is intentend for the colorblind people. Although most can still see that the colors as different, with different shades, it would be better for them if the difference is more noticeable
it probably also helps if u plan to print it
colorblind*
also 40th like
@@ZerickKilgore ouch, didn't notice the typo 😅
@@MarcioHuser What typo? If there was a "u" after the "o", then it's not a typo, it's simply British spelling.
@@CZghostI corrected the type. It was "colorblinG" 😅
Steve is nearly 70 years old and has been coding in x86 assembler for 40 years continually producing the SpinRite drive checking software since the early 80s. He also publishes Security Now the podcast which has been going for nearly 20 years too. That could explain the old timey style of the software, and thats why the EXE size is so small - its hand coded assembler.
God that sounds old! 70! Fortunately, I still feel about half that age! :)
Been listening to you and Leo since episode 1 - you actually helped me get a career in podcasting and Im 45 and feel half that age too! :) All the best Steve! - @@SGgrc
We love you Steve !! ❤
In about 35 years, that won't seem old 🙂@@SGgrc
I listen too security now for 10years and use some of Steve programs
Amazon really needs to be more motivated to crack down on these scams. They are literally everywhere on amazon and blatantly obvious.
When I noticed the scams, stopped purchasing ANY drives from Amazon.
Amazon even deletes negative feedback about being fake. Atleast in one Atomic Shrimps video did.
The Chief Executive Officer of Amazon should do something about it because they wouldn't want the company to be filled with negative reviews and other crap that could harm the company.
Obvious how?
@@stevevastathe price. You're not going to get a 1 TB pen drive for $20.
Wow - just realized 3 USBs I have are fake and I am getting my money back from the merchant as we speak - you literally just saved me like 50$ because of this video - THANK YOU
I just tested my 1TB flash drive and it's coming back as only 32GB. Thanks for the video.
3:39 the monochrome view is most likely meant for people with color blindness or vision problems. That's likely the reason it exists.
N word
@@Chomta what
@@MinusNC YES
Coming 😩😩
It's surprising that no scammer has yet used reasonable prices so at least the product wouldn't look suspiciously cheap.
I agree ... but I also think that it's part of the strategy, because they don't calculate on digital well educated people on actually buying their drives but your average Joes and Josefines, which think they got a real bargain and then when they eventually find out the drive failed they think it's defective "bad luck" but nothing more serious which combined with the low price just makes them just take the loss instead of demanding a refund and therefore giving the scammers little to no fuss about it.
I think that, in a lot of cases, scammers don't try too hard to hide the fact that it's a scam so that the knowledgeable and the sceptical will pass on by and they'll only hit their target more gullible mark. Makes for less scamming effort on their part.
You're overestimating how intelligent the average consumer is. Don't forget that countless people fall for scams where you have a guy telling you to mail them Google Play gift cards to the "IRS" and countless others of the sort. Most non-tech people would have no idea what a 2TB drive should be priced at.
They have done. I bought a competitively-priced SanDisk 16Gb USB stick that was actually fake. I knew it was fake just by taking one look at it.
It's actually their tactic, you aka buyer will less likely to get "angry" if you buy fake with cheaper price, it's like their way of telling you that this is fake and if you buy it then you know you buy a bad quality product and has no reason to get angry to me.
Btw I left a review on the fake drive which you can see here: www.amazon.com/review/RZLAX8TNIJBEI/
Well unfortunately most reviews are positive, since people either never actually check the drives, or never check the data they put there..
@@olestas true. Most comments seem positive. 1tb usb 2.0 with 4mb/s reads. Sheesh. Its mostly non computer people too. When they realize that their data is gonna its gonna be tough
I got a fake USB stick long ago. Ever since then, I've only bought flash memory devices with brands I recognize and only from reputable dealers less likely to end up with counterfeits. Never had a bad one since.
I've gotten some flash drives from Aliexpress for cheap. Including the Kingston ones.
To no suprise, non-kingston ones are almost all fake, few ones are actually good.
All Kingston ones are suprisingly good, though.
Got 4 64GB from eBay (reasonable priced) all fake.
I actually used the old german software back in the day that filled the drive up to see how much it could write. Yes it took ages to do but called out a "Samsung" micro SD card I got on eBay back in the day. Now I only buy from Samsung's Amazon store directly. It looked authentic in every way
As I've stated in a comment on another video, I had that happen to me back in 2016 while I was on a cruise. I was given a supposed 128GB MicroSD card for Christmas 2015 to use in my digital camera for taking pictures during the cruise. I did not know that the family member who bought it, bought it from Ebay for $10. The reason I didn't know is because they wanted it to be a surprise. Well, in a nutshell, when the cruise ship was docked in Florida (we were going to the Bahamas), I took over 200+ pictures with my digital camera and when I went to view them on my camera, because I didn't have a laptop with me, I discovered that almost ALL of those Florida pictures were completely lost FOREVER and I was beyond angry when that happened. I will NEVER purchase ANY type of storage device from Amazon or any other website like that, unless it is cloud storage, I will go to a physical store to buy it outright.
Don't trust cloud storage either - not in lieu of a physical backup! Apart from the problems associated with storing files in the cloud, you will not have all of your files physically on your system, and some programs, especially utility programs for backing up and renaming files, will not see files that are not physically on your drive. Also, there are occasionally back-sync issues, when it syncs the wrong way. This is more likely if you have more than one computer using the same cloud storage; often the latest version of a file on your computer will get replaced by an older version that was, for example, recently saved on a different computer or even deleted from another computer.
That sucks :( I've tried something similar like that. After moving my photos from my camera to a USB, many of the files got corrupted even though it looked they weren't gone. I bought a cheap USB on Aliexpress so it's my fault for not thinking straight. But what about a trusted brand that sell on Amazon as well as in physical stores? I've bought SanDisk USBs in physical stores and on their official Amazon page too and I've never experienced any problems
Big ouch!
I allways destroy everything on a disk or stick and start with partitioning, formatting and dumping random data onto it, until its space runs over. This is the prove that it's working correct.
Those memories will live FOREVER in our hearts ❤🔥
Steve Gibson's GRC products are top notch. Used his stuff for many years, always Red Hot and accurate
Atomic Shrimp did a video on fake SD cards the other day, reported it to Amazon (where he got it), and left a 1 star review with proof. Amazon decided to delete his comment and scold him in an email.
I'd think that on this side of the world, Amazon could be prosecuted as an accessory to fraud for doing that.
I had no idea back in 2008 that fake drives existed. I was on holiday in Philippines, my phone memory was getting near full, there was tons of stuff on it not just holiday stuff. I went into a proper looking electronic store and bought a m2 drive. Put it in the phone, did the set up on screen. My mistake was instead of copying to the new card I just did a transfer of files. It seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, progress bar was moving. When it got to the end my photo album in the phone was empty, but sadly the memory card was also empty. Lost a lot of work related stuff and at the time some precious memories of the holiday
that legitimately sucks
Thank you for telling me that my school project is gone. A "64 GB" usb stick is only 8 GB. Now I can recreate it.
The reason for having a non-color dependent chart in the report, is that about 10% of men are red-green colorblind. Confronted with that chart you showed, my husband would say that either the drive is all good, or all fake.
Need to remember old wisdom: if it seems too good to be true, it's probably not true. If 1TB HDD cost 50+, how could flash drive be 20?
Buying a 2TB drive only to find out its just 64GB
These fake flash drives are cheaper than a 64GB drive in local stores, so it's worth it if you don't want to store important data.
@@krystal5887True
@@U.S.A.i can get a 64gb sandisk usb for 9 euro in stores here in Netherlands. Thats not much
We can now get flexed on by members on RUclips. Hooray!
I got one for my switch from Walmart and it supposed to be 2tb and it not only 8 gb
This is great, thanks Joe. I recently bought a Samsung 128 GB flash drive and just tested it using Vali Drive, and fortunately it's a genuine 128 GB. The test was very fast. I bought this drive from Micro Center so I wasn't really worried about it being fake but I certainly would hesitate buying one off eBay or Amazon at this point.
I still remember paying 125$ for a 32GB thumbdrive, turned out to be fake. Because of that, I went back to 4.7GB DVD which I am still using to this day. Also the monochrome map is really good, my father can't see color at all so it is really helpful for people like him.
I have still DVD-RAM in use.
Why isn't this video getting popular?
This is a good example to buy from Reputable local computer outlets.
I've only ever had one fake drive in my possession. It did this weird thing where the writes basically went to a looping queue, so every write was successful and up to the real size of the drive could be read back accurately. It was super annoying when I had some data and the only part left intact was the end of it.
Buying fake drives is a great way to get FREE thumb drives. I bought 10x 64GB drives from a seller some years ago and they turned out to be 8GB. I actually wanted 8GB and I knew they were fake so after filing a claim and getting a full refund I got 10x FREE 8GB thumb drives LOL! Then just partition the drive to the real size and leave the remaining part unformatted and they work great!
First that isn't a member
(For real i'm second)
2nd close enough
monochrome is for red-green colorblind
You bought the exact one I got.
I also bought a different 1TB flash drive before that one. The first one I got turned out to be 8GB. I figured it was just defective because it wouldn't play any videos I put on it.
So I got the one you featured in your video. I am confident it ruined my front facing USB drives it was that bad.
I reported both fake drives/sellers to amazon and they responded by taking down my one star reviews I left to warn other shoppers. But amazon then deleted my review.
I unloaded righteous indignation on them through an online chat after they took down my "verified purchase" review. They ended up putting my review back up after I blasted them for the decision.
But I don't really care my review is back up. The fake flash drive is still for sale.
Amazon doesn't give two squirts of a rat's butt that people are being conned on these things. I guess they figure as long as they allow returns and refunds, their customers should clap and be happy like beached seals and not care they allow scammers to proliferate on their website.
I reported fakes on Amazon got banned from reporting & community
Still, all these years later, I question your videos :) Is it real? Is this true? Even if it's something I KNOW you doing a video about it makes me question reality.
Also, love your videos, old and young alike.
Nice that there's finally A quick tester - I wrote A drive tester when I suspected A "2TB" drive of being fake (it was) but it took FOREVER to run.
And yet I'm surprised people think something like ValiDrive is new... h2testw (or f3write on linux) is quite old by now.. (8+ years). I do like the quick test speed of ValiDrive, though h2testw is more thorough. Not sure if ValiDrive even detects fake sticks that just math mod 64 their storage... (if 64 is the real capacity) as you can actually write data at the 1.5 TB mark and also read it back. I thought this is how all fake drives work... I sadly don't have fake drives with me to check if ValiDrive would detect those... Given the authors description of it, it won't.
oh no...... I have just realized that I have brought a bunch of those flash drives on amazon a long time ago. and if they are fake then oh my I probably didn't know
The Amazon scam goes as follows. The fake seller will make a listing for an item that's completely different from a flash drive. One where $15-$30 is a realistic price for a legit one. They leave it that way for a while and let the good reviews come in, then, once they have enough good reviews, they change the listing to the fake flash drive.
I've been going straight to the Samsung store and buying my SSDs, USB flash drives, and memory cards there because I've lost trust in the third party sellers on eBay and Amazon. The price is a bit higher but I get legit stuff delivered to my door. Knock on wood.
I bought 4 really cheap flash drives from aliexpress from different sellers. They all claimed to be 2TB but in reality 1 was 32GB, 2 were 64GB and 1 was 128GB. I reported this fact to aliexpress and they issued full refund on all of them. So even if they are not 2TB as they claimed, I still got a bunch of free flash drives out of it.
Its depressing how easily companies can get away with blatant lying just to make profit.
If it's too good to be true, it usually is. I think educating people on how to spot scams would go a long way in combatting these grifts. Or Amazon etc. could take some responsibility for the crap that is sold via their platform but I'm not holding my breath.
I hope it works on micro SD and regular SD drives.
Great looking utility. And given it's from the guy behind Spinrite you know it'll be good. I'd imagine the monochrome mode is for people with colour blindness.
The monochrome view is for people like me who can't see the difference between VALIDATED and WRITE ERROR. I appreciate the creator for the accommodation.
I tested and discovered two drives of two TB each really have 14 GB storage. Thank You for the video! I will be returning the drives and look forward to testing all future new drives.
I remember back in the day when I first buy a flash drive it was 10-15$ for a 2GB storage. And now I checked online store that were few months ago the price were crazy cheap like 5$ for a 2TB storage and I was like "Damn, so this is the future.." but when I check the review they all saying it was a fake storage, the real size were only like 5GB and then I go "Yup, this is the future of scamming".
Yea, I got done by this too. Price looked too good to be true, but I'm a sucker and I bought it anyway. At least now I can prove it's fake and hopefully get my money back.
$20 for an obviously fake drive??? Why tf does anyone use amazon? The exact same fake drives are like $5 on ebay...
Too bad we can't select a drive from the start. This issue is not only happening with thumb drives. It's also happening with sata drives, which makes it hard to attach after this app is started. Unless you place it in an external drive case.
Sadly these tools wont be seen by the vast majority of people who buy these drives. These are commonly bought by elderly people, because they see this price and that seems reasonable to them as things were indeed alot cheaper back then overall, and sellers know this. Amazon really needs to hire somebody to anonymously buy these drives and test them.
As long as Amazon do the bare minimum to combat them, they have no other incentive to do so. If it makes the news they can just put out a press statement and people will forget once the news cycle moves on. Many people will only buy through Amazon these days, and they've stamped out a lot of the competition with the free delivery on orders over a certain price, and the speed people are used to of anything sold or fulfilled by Amazon.
I try to avoid them where possible these days (especially since they ended Smile, and often other retailers can have the same product cheaper) but I doubt most people would have that sort of self-control.
More to the point: Electronics are much cheaper now than they used to be. My first laptop, with a 210 (? sounds wrong) MB hard drive, cost three times as much as the much more powerful laptop i use now. (And this tablet cost one-eighth as much.) It's logical to assume that flash drives would similarly offer more for less money.
good thing I live in a country that will put you in jail (or give a massive fine) for tricking costumers (we have very good costumer protection).
I don't buy from 3rd party sellers on amazon anymore. It's like scam world HQ there.
That was a great tip! I've been using Heise's flash drive tester, but that one is brute force, mow the lawn, solution and takes hours to crank through 400 GB of flash. Validrive finished in a couple of seconds. My hit rate on fake drives is about 33%, since I tend to buy cheap, and the cheap ones are more likely to be fake.
Joe: "you can also choose monochrome view if you want, for some reason..."
Everyone with red/green colorblindness: "EMOTIONAL DAMAGE"
who would buy unknown usb sticks? Who would buy something else that a kingston se9 g3?
Thanks for this. Question : in such a case of detecting that the divice only has 64GB, is there a way to reset/rewrite the firmware or do anything to the USB so that we can use it just as that 64GB drive, rather than windows thinking its 2TB and nuking all the data while writing.
It wouldn't be possible or be really hard to rewrite the firmware. If it is an SD card, or some small capacity SSD connected to a USB adapter/controller, disconnect it from the controller adapter, buy a new adapter and connect the storage device to the new adapter. Most of the times there is a small capacity SD card which has normal firmware connected to a USB controller/adapter which is falsely reporting that information.
You can re-create the partition up to the available size
If you repartition it and set the partition size to the real size then even if you reformat it only the real part (the previously set partition) will be accessible.
@@MarcioHuser Well, yes. It is possible but I'm not sure it takes the 64 GB out of the real size and not some fake size part
You might be lucky to lookup the controller of the scam usb on google to see if people have posted the programming tools for said controller.
Is there a way to make those drives ''legit'' again and put their real capacity so they don't have to be thrown away?
So, if you discover you have a 'fake' drive, you take it back to the store and say.....*uh, yeah, this is fake, can I have my money back?*
Technically, the drive isn't fake, the capacity is. These are also far more likely to be sold online than locally.
The reason it has monochrome is for color blind people, my dad is colorblind and can’t see red and green so that would help
Great video, i was just wondering if there is a solution to repartition the drive to the real size so you can use it.
Steve Gibson from Security Now! He is the star of the show! I'm a huge fan of him when it comes to anything security-related. And I know about ValiDrive even before I watch this video. :)
Thank you for this. I'd recently bought a few thumb drives to move some movies to my parents TV. Couldn't figure out why they werent working. Exactly like you said, the first one I tested was rated at 62GB, was sold as a 2.1TB and that's what the header says it is.
They cannot be fake if you bought it directly from the people that made them though.... Like Samsung for example. I bought my MicroSD Card for my Steam Deck for one directly from there Website not from a third party website. It was 100% legit. Always buy storage DIRECTLY from the manufacturer themselves not a third party website. I rather buy my drives directly from the makers themselves than a third party seller.
So, your takeaway message here is to always buy from the manufacturer. Got it.
And is why the biggest flash drives you will find me buying are 64 megabytes.
64 megabytes 😂 - yeah, this was a good size in ~2002... Nowadays you can do literally nothing with this capacity, save perhaps 10 fotos...😮
@@Wlad1 or, 8-bit roms
@@Wlad1 So, you're a Size Queen. Good to know, lady.
I had a 2tb thumbstick several years ago that I got for laughably cheap. The tool I used filled it up to test the storage space which somehow caused the drive itself to fail and it is no longer recognized when you plug it in. I wonder if this software would have been able to tell me how much it actually was. Steve Gibson is really good. Thanks for the video, love those channel
Thanks again Joe for another video of important information that gives yet another thing to worry about! 🥴
I love steve gibson, his software hideously ugly in the most wholesome way.
perfectly timed video. I want to buy a 1tb external HDD and am wary of being scammed
Steve Gibson (Spinrite) is a real pro and I would trust my data to him. He has been writing software since the DOS days, and he was an expert in hard drives back when you needed a controller card to use a drive. He also used to (and probably still does) program exclusively in assembly.
Oh, nice, more people are talking about this. Atomic Shrimp has been showing people this for a while.
I just heard about it now LOL. I always did wonder how a 2TB thumb drive could be $5 LOL
Thank you! I have been hearing more and more about fake thumb drives lately... Glad there is a quick and easy tool to verify 🙂
Yep, and not just thumb drives. There's a lot of fake external TB SSD drives that, if you open them up, contain just a 64GB micro SSD, plus some circuitry to spoof your OS into thinking it's 1 or more TB. They're usually very well sealed units, so you have to pretty much break the cases to get into them and check.
@@fredbloggs8072 Manufacturers love to take away right to repair...
i wonder what will happen when i run it on a usb floppy drive...
If it had the function of fixing the Flash Drive to its correct size it would be a great addition, or at least indicating how from Windows. A while ago I bought a fake USB stick that said 32 GB, and from Windows I reprogrammed it to a closer value.
Some drives probably have the size hard-coded, but your experience suggests that the size code may also be in flash memory and could be updated. But the question is, how?
How did you do it?
@melkiorwiseman5234 @ALph4cro Sorry for the late. I honestly didn't remember how, but I found the commands I wrote in a text file.
diskpart
list disk
select disk {number}
clean
create partition primary size={number of megabytes}
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit
@@katosnook That sadly only partially fixes the problem. The rest is still recognized as unallocated by the system and by the software that checks for fake capacities. I'm wondering if it's possible to reflash it to its true capacity but can't find any way to do it.
@@ALph4cro At least you no longer have to worry about copying files across the line.