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Ah Shenzhen! Such a wonderful and interesting city. If you are there, make sure you get to the Lo Wu Baby Factory AKA The Luohu Commercial City. I jest, it's

Ah Shenzhen! Such a wonderful and interesting city. If you are there, make sure you get to the Lo Wu Baby Factory AKA The Luohu Commercial City. I jest, it's actually not a baby factory, that's just what we called it for some reason. It's a humongous mall where you can buy pretty much anything in any quantity, of the lowest or highest quality, you just have to know what you are doing. I bought a 64 GB USB drive there in 2007. I knew it was fake, but I wanted to see how they were doing it. There was also the memorable time when I found a DVD shop, all pirated stuff, where they literally had every movie and TV show ever put on DVD, Like The Complete MacGyver . You peruse through a CD binder to find the DVDs you want and then a few minutes later a little kid pops out of the ceiling with your DVDs and the scampers back up into the ceiling. There are legit products there, don't get me wrong, but I was fascinated with the fake and knockoff stuff.

thearn4 11y ago
> I bought a 64 GB USB drive there in 2007. I knew it was fake, but I wanted to see how they were doing it Out of curiosity (if you remember), what was its actual capacity?
- snake_plissken 11y ago
  Heh it actually had zero capacity, or rather functionality. You could successfully move gigabytes of data onto the thing and when probed it would report back that it had like a 58 GB partition, but then you could not access any of those files. It was using some sort of custom controller to mimic a legit file system but I don't recall the complete details, just that there was definitely no flash memory chip on the PCB. I have it stashed away somewhere, I should dig it up do another analysis.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Check out http://www.neowin.net/news/fake-chinese-500-gb-external-drive-is-one-clever-paperweight-literally http://www.neowin.net/news/fake-chinese-500-gb-external-driv... for an impressive one of these. It reports as a 500 GB drive to the computer and you can copy small files to/from it. But it's basically a ring buffer; once the actual (much smaller) capacity is full it goes back to the beginning and starts writing over the earlier data.

thearn4 11y ago

> I bought a 64 GB USB drive there in 2007. I knew it was fake, but I wanted to see how they were doing it Out of curiosity (if you remember), what was its actual capacity?

snake_plissken 11y ago
Heh it actually had zero capacity, or rather functionality. You could successfully move gigabytes of data onto the thing and when probed it would report back that it had like a 58 GB partition, but then you could not access any of those files. It was using some sort of custom controller to mimic a legit file system but I don't recall the complete details, just that there was definitely no flash memory chip on the PCB. I have it stashed away somewhere, I should dig it up do another analysis.
wlesieutre 11y ago
Check out http://www.neowin.net/news/fake-chinese-500-gb-external-drive-is-one-clever-paperweight-literally http://www.neowin.net/news/fake-chinese-500-gb-external-driv... for an impressive one of these. It reports as a 500 GB drive to the computer and you can copy small files to/from it. But it's basically a ring buffer; once the actual (much smaller) capacity is full it goes back to the beginning and starts writing over the earlier data.