11 ms·
I bought a (little too) cheap large SSD off the internet. It was surprisingly slow, but it seemed to work fine, so I assumed that's the reason for the low price
by bheadmaster 2y ago
I bought a (little too) cheap large SSD off the internet. It was surprisingly slow, but it seemed to work fine, so I assumed that's the reason for the low price - until I tried to backup my other SSD on it. After the first ~50 GiB, all the writes suddenly failed and I could only perform reads.
After re-formatting it and attempting the backup a few more times, I was frustrated, so I searched the internet for related problems and found out about these so-called "chinese scam drives" that announce size to the drivers that is much larger than actual, and just throw away any writes above some memory address.
I quickly found f3 and tested it - and sure enough, it was a chinese scam drive. I reported the seller to the local inspection and they confiscated all the other drives and gave them a huge fine. I feel pretty smug about it.
- dooglius 2y agoWhat do you mean by "the local inspection"? The police?
- Almondsetat 2y agothe SSDPD
- bheadmaster 2y agoI suppose the US equivalent would be the FTC (assuming they can confiscate and fine?).
- more_corn 2y agolol you’ve clearly never interacted with the FTC.
- dooglius 2y agoDid the seller happen to be based in your country? It seems unlikely to me the FTC would do anything about an online purchase to begin with, especially not if it was from China.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoThe US has an International Trade Comission that does seize counterfeit imports and those that violate trademarks without being deceptive clones. They aren't going to do much for one unit, but if an importer is bringing in container loads, then they may exercise the authority.
- bheadmaster 2y ago> Did the seller happen to be based in your country? Yes, they were running some internet re-sell business, probably buying cheap stuff off Amazon and re-selling it locally for a higher price.
- marcosdumay 2y agoFrom the wording, the GP didn't mean a federal organization. Does the US have no local trade protection organizations? They are organized in a way that I would expect their states to insist on this.
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoNot op, but if someone is advertising X (eg. 10tb o space), and the reality is Y (not 10tb of space), you can call "trades inspection" (Tržna inšpekcija), and they can issue fines, etc.
- amelius 2y agoAny hope of AliExpress policing this at some point?
- k4rli 2y agoSite that only offers 2 weeks for order complaints after receiving? Not a chance, they love money and don't care about anything after item has arrived.
- thedanbob 2y agoHad a similar experience with a friend's "10 TB" SSD. After I tested it with f3 and confirmed it was fake, I opened the case and found a 64 GB microSD card and an adapter/faker board.
- LorenPechtel 2y ago"10 TB"? Why did you even need to open it??
- thedanbob 2y agoWell, at first it only showed up as 2 TB, which was at least possible though unlikely. But f3 indicated it was faking 10, at which point I realized it was presenting several additional partitions that were so corrupted the OS wasn’t even making them available to mount. After that I opened it just to see what was inside.
- Nzen 2y agoI suspect LorenPechtel's terse question implies that a 10 TB drive would weigh appreciably more with real hardware than a microSD card.
- codetrotter 2y agoSSDs can be pretty lightweight. And also sometimes the fake ones have a piece of metal or even a rock glued to the inside of the thing to make it feel heavier.
- wtallis 2y agoWeight doesn't even have to be accounted for. There's simply no technological or marketing reason to manufacture a 10TB SSD. An odd size like that is already a massive red flag.
- sm_1024 2y agoThey do make 10 TB+ SSDs: https://www.allhdd.com/kioxia-kcmyxrug15t3-15.36tb-ssd https://www.allhdd.com/kioxia-kcmyxrug15t3-15.36tb-ssd Infact, Kioxia's enterprise line goes up to 30 TB/drive.