If someone is trying to sell you 30 TB of hard storage for less than $40, consider turning around and running, no matter how many clip art rockets they use in their photos.
High-capacity SSDs seem to be getting more expensive all the time, but in the words of a security researcher known as revised opinion On Twitter, there are still some bargains Too good to be true. In the spirit of discovery, he bought a “30TB” external SSD drive from AliExpress for $31.40, which also happened to be Listed on Walmart website for $39 (I associate it with educational and entertainment value, please do not buy it).
For those of you who follow this thread but don’t understand the scam:
Gamer gets two 512MB flash drives. Or 1 GB or whatever. Then they add a hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size.
Windows reports exactly 15.0 TB. Not 14.89, not 14.78
– Beam [REDACTED] (RayRedacted) August 26, 2022
But when you go to WRITE a large file, the compromised firmware simply overwrites all the new data on top of the old data, keeping the directory (with the wrong information) intact.
H2Testw actually writes and then reads its data. But the scammer slowed the bus from 5 Gbps to 0.48 Gbps
– Beam [REDACTED] (RayRedacted) August 26, 2022
On the inside, the “SSD” looks like two small capacity microSD cards glued to a USB 2.0 capable board. The firmware of this board has been modified so that every one of these cards becomes capacity reports As “15.0 TB” for the operating system, for a total of 30 TB, although the actual capacity of the cards is much less. This is another gift. Windows reports drive capacities in gigabytes (1,024 megabytes) or tibytes (1,024 gigabytes), while drive manufacturers use gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) and terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). This is why a 1TB drive usually only has a capacity of 930GB, rather than a nice round number.
Motivation is smarter when it comes to tricking people into thinking it’s working. It preserves the directory structure of whatever you copy, but when you “copy” your data, it keeps overwriting and overwriting the microSD cards. Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn’t there.
Responses to Ray Redacted thread are full of alternative versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the pasted microSD version and at least one iteration Hide a mini USB drive inside a larger container.
Fake USB storage devices are neither new nor rare, although this one makes astonishingly outrageous claims about its gigabyte price. When it comes to buying online storage space, the common sense advice is best: stick to label brands, and buy from trustworthy sellers (not just retail sites you trust – Walmart’s listing is sold by “JD E Commerce America Limited,” whatever that), and know that if the deal sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
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