Why the Heck Is Amazon Selling These Fake 16 Terabyte Portable SSD Drives?
It’s clear that the manufacturer, whoever that may be, didn’t want people to take this hard drive apart. There are no seams, no screws, no obvious points of access. I found a pinhole near the USB-C port resembling a SIM card access point. But no amount of prodding did anything. So I broke out my trusty iFixit tools and pried the thing apart.
“What would I find inside?” I wondered as I carefully shoved one end inside the case. Hopefully, I didn’t break whatever was inside. Maybe it really would be a magical 16TB M.2 SSD drive. Perhaps they just installed it incorrectly, and thus it wasn’t performing correctly. Or maybe, if I were to suggest more likely outcomes, I would open the casing and find world peace. Or the solution to unlimited energy. Or at least the answer to why hot dogs come in ten packs while hot dog buns come in 8 packs.
Alas, once I managed to take the drive apart, I found exactly what I suspected from my tests: a micro SD card slotted into a circuit board acting as a USB-C adapter. The micro SD card doesn’t have any markings on the front side, and some serial numbers on the back that seem to confirm the 64 GB size my testing revealed.
Why does Windows show a 16TB drive, then? That’s likely a part of the board’s firmware, falsely reporting a size that doesn’t exist. This thing is a total lie, from top to bottom.