SSD Scams
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There are SSD listed for sale that grossly misrepresent their storage capacity, with hacked firmware that report capacities and file sizes grossly larger than actual (e.g., even after you plug it in, the OS will report terabytes of capacity, you can copy onto it terabytes of files and the OS will report that the copies have been successfully made and list the files with big file sizes, all while under the hood the SSD has only megabytes of capacity and your data have simply been overwritten).
How to avoid scams like this? Buy only reputable brands and buy only from reputable sellers. Listing on a well-known site (e.g., Amazon.com or Walmart.com) is not sufficient because these consumer facing e-commerce sites let lots of third parties list their wares. You want to check who the actual seller is.
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Interesting
I usually buy stuff like that from newegg.com. I also make sure that I am buying directly from newark.com and not some third-party that has the device listed on their site.
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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.
