Giant Size Ssd, Ridiculously Cheap

I bought a noname usb ssd from China, for less than 40 US$, specified to 64TeraBytes. Connected it to my Windows 11 laptop and started copying a couple of folders as a test. I thought it was slow, then I came to think of the fact that it was specified for Windows 10 and older. So I connected it to a Win10 computer. Then I got the idea to change the volume name to something more specific than "SSD" (I have several ssd:s). Change was not accepted, and what's worse, the drive stopped working. Got the message "Drive must be formatted", and started the formatting, with "Fast formatting" unchecked. After an hour or so, I got a message, "No drive in this unit". Tried "fast formatting" - and it worked!

Now I have a couple of questiona: is there somebody here who has seen the same ad, or similar, and bought the same noname ssd for the same ridiculous price? What's your opinion? How can they sell such a thing at such a price?

I asked the editors of my computing magazine if they had bought one of these for testing. Answer was "No, this must be a fake, with this memory size it would cost tens of thousands of dollars. It's probably manipulated to show 64TB while having only some GBs. And it may contain spy programs. Stop using it."

Maybe I should. But in this moment it's being checked by BitDefender, which will take a few hours.

There's a possibility, I think, that my formatting has destroyed the potential harmful software. But I am not sure, I am not a computer expert and I don't exactly know what formatting does and the differences between normal formatting and fast formatting (of course I have seen the warning "everything on this drive will be erased"). Perhaps I should try reformatting with "fast format" unchecked - I don't expect to get the same error message ("no drive") if I do.

If you wonder what the ad for this ssd looks like, just google "64TB". You will see they offer drives with even more memory.

 

There are a ton of stories about cheap large USB / SSD storage out there, and they are usually fake. If the deal sounds too good to be true it's because it is.
They modify the controllers, so the device appears to have the advertised space, when they don't. Amazon is supposedly littered with them.
Sounds like when you copy more data than it can store it corrupts itself..lol.
BTW, I have several cheap bridges for sale if you're interested.

 

Thanks for your answer - you agree with my computer magazine editors then.

 

I’d bet money that the drive is fake.
You can use this utility to check the drive for authenticity:
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
If it is fake or genuine then it will inform you of this. You will not lose data on the drive using this program.

 

Thanks a lot - too bad I can't try it now, the *!# thing doesn't respond. It's all over now...

 

At least you know now that these drives are fake.

 

Guess so. But what if I made things worse by trying to change the name of the volume? Is that something you should be able to do on a USB SSD? Never tried that before.

 

I name my internal SSD and USB SSD drives. Never had a problem caused by it. As stated, if it sounds to good to be true...

 

Renaming shouldn’t affect the drive.
Did you try using diskpart the clean the drive?
If not:
Right click start & choose powershell or terminal with admin:
Type diskpart & click enter
Type list disk & click enter
Type select disk X (where X is the number of the drive you wish to clean) & click enter
Type Clean & click enter

If at any time it fails then the drive is bad.
If it doesn’t fail then open disk management & initialise & format the drive.

 

Thanks, I'll try Powershell and so on.

 

Yesterday I wrote that the suspect does not respond. Now it did - when I moved it back to the computer where I formatted it. It was recognized by Windows 10 long enough to let me run Validrive. Then the computer lost contact with it.
Anyway, now it's confirmed by Validrive that this is a fraud. Let's see what the seller, Fruugo (a smaller competitor to AliBaba), says about my Validrive report. I suppose they will deny being the seller, "We're just the middleman".

Somebody wants to see the report? I won't upload it until there's a popular demand. I can tell you it's all red except for one lonely tiny green square at the start.

 

As expected.
I have no doubt the seller will say to return it to China in order to receive a full refund but as buyers of fake drives in the UK have found it costs more to return it than the original cost.

 

Isn't filing a complaint with a credit card company also an option, or has too much time elapsed?

 

If I were the credit card company I would answer: if something sounds too good to be true, don't buy. But it could be worth a try. The EU also has some kind of consumer protection, I think. But the 40 dollars I've lost is a small price to pay for the lesson.

 

It depends on their policy. The limit for claiming could be 30-90 days. There’s certainly no harm in asking them to consider a chargeback.
As they say if something sounds to good to be true then it usually is.