Not surprisingly, these “30 terabyte” SSDs you should buy at Walmart and AliExpress are all a rip-off
It’s in all probability not that a lot of a shock to most of us who truly use giant storage drives however there appears to be an enormous pattern recently, a complete flurry of drives popping up on websites like AliExpress and even Walmart claiming some fairly insane capacities at an much more insane value. We’ve seen this earlier than with microSD playing cards from generic manufacturers that declare to be 1TB after they’re not even shut, however I haven’t seen it fairly this blatant earlier than.
The 1TB microSD card rip-off is sort of plausible as a result of 1TB microSD playing cards do truly exist and we’ve reviewed samples from SanDisk and Silicon Energy right here on DIYP. However a 30TB moveable SSD? This capability doesn’t even exist from the massive manufacturers but. How about 60TB? Yeah, I’ve seen these on the market, too. And if the capability alone wasn’t sufficient to stay a honking massive pink flag proper in entrance of your face, what if I instructed you a few of these “60TB” ones had been lower than $15?
None of those are what they declare to be. However don’t take my phrase for it, take the phrase of cybersecurity researcher Ray Redacted, who purchased one so as to see precisely what was inside it and what capability it actually was.
His journey begins with merely ordering the drive. And when it arrived, a label on the surface of the field did certainly declare 30TB. It additionally claimed to be an M.2 SSD with USB 3.1 connectivity. Contained in the field was a transportable enclosure with a Kind-C socket together with a Kind-A to Kind-C cable and two adapters that look like for OTG use with smartphones.
Earlier than connecting it to his pc, he set about making an attempt to see what was contained in the enclosure. There have been no screws or apparent option to open it, however he finally managed to tug it open utilizing a razor blade and slide it out.
What he noticed inside is certainly not M.2, however what seems to be a twin microSD card reader with a few microSD playing cards actually hot-glued into place.
When supplied with energy, the LED gentle got here on…
Plugging it into the pc did certainly reveal a pair of 15TB drives. Or not less than, that’s what it instructed the working system it contained. His son observed that the system solely appeared to work with USB 2.0, that means that the USB 3.1 declare was additionally nonsense (if we didn’t know this already).
A fellow Twitter person identified that US retailer Walmart had apparently fallen for this rip-off, too, and was actively promoting these drives on their web site. The itemizing since seems to have been taken down.
So how are these drives not 30TB after they declare to be 30TB? Nicely, it’s just about the identical because the outdated 1TB microSD card rip-off, as Ray explains…
Briefly, it’s nothing greater than a few very low capability (within the MBs, not even GBs) microSD playing cards utilizing an affordable USB 2.0 hub chip that’s been programmed to misreport the capability of these microSD playing cards again to the pc. However as Ray notes, it does it in a really intelligent method, as for those who try to write down one thing to the system that’s bigger than the scale of the cardboard you’re writing to, it merely overwrites the information it’s already written, making it appear like the file has transferred utterly. In the event you attempt to copy it again, although… Nope, not gonna occur. The information simply isn’t there.
In the event you’re on the lookout for low cost giant storage and also you’re undecided if a deal is a rip-off or not, simply have a learn via Ray’s complete Twitter thread. A lot of folks got here out to indicate a lot of different gadgets that equally rip-off the shopper. As Ray begins his opening put up, if it sounds too good to be true, it in all probability is!
