Is this Cheap 1TB USB Flash Drive Worth Your Time?

If you’ve not heard of these before, a fake capacity flash drive is simply a small low capacity flash drive pretending to have (much) more storage. The clever / devious part is that they may have only 16GB of real storage, but can appear to the computer as anything up to 2TB. You will be able to copy data to the device, but only the first 16GB may be readable later. Some devices constantly overwrite the same 16GB while other just dump the rest of the data into a back hole

How Do I Know If My 512GB, 1TB and 2TB USB Drive is Fake?

There are not any strict rules, but you can start to build up a picture as you gather more information.

Price – These flash drives will be WAY cheaper than anything you can buy in a retail store. We just bought 512GB flash drives for £10 and 1TB drives for £15. Currently a 64GB SD card is £32.48 at Novatech, so you can see how expensive real flash drives should be.
Quality – Large capacity USB drives are relatively expensive. You’d expect them to be well made and probably well packaged. The fake drives usually come unbranded, in generic clear bags.
Wording – Since these problems have been reported, some sellers are putting some disclaimers on the listings to suggest you should only use the devices for small amounts of data etc. This is obviously nonsense. If you buy a real 1TB of storage, you can use all 1TB.
Testing – Although most people won’t be familiar with testing hardware, there are some pretty simple tools to test USB drives. They write patterns of data to the chosen device and then read it back again to make sure it was written correctly.

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[cloizen]

I knew a $20 1TB USB was too good to be true, i knew something was fishy. Thanks for saving me from a scam and possible malware.

[protectorofillinois]

That's the exact same USB flash drive I got from Amazon, but they're sold thru their seller called Whewer. I bought 8 of the 2TB USB flash drives ($65.32 each) and I personally have no problems with them at all - no viruses, no errors, nothing. I use 1 for storing my music files, 1 for duplicating and storing my favorite tv shows on DVD, 1 for storing my pictures (and I have a lot of pics lol), 1 for storing my documents, and 1 for storing all of my music files (I have about 6, 000 of them). I haven't figured out what I will store on the remaining 3 though. I personally don't trust cloud storage at all.

[rodx]

FAT is file allocation table. FAT32 is table size. EXFAT is EXTENDED file allocation table. they make them look bigger by spoofing the drive controller.

[kenosentity]

Ok I'm not buying anything off unbranded sellers again. Period. I've never done it in the past anyways but now I'm really not doing it. Thanks again bro.

[Chickenfanatic]

Many of these cheap USB sticks over 256GB are formatted using a utility to show a higher capacity; their actual usable size is much less. The cost of the flash memory that goes in them increases exponentially after 256GB. If you're paying less than $100 for an external USB thumb drive, something is wrong. There are a lot of different USB drive options and applicable factors that go into your decision when purchasing an external drive. Hard disk drives that use magnetic media on a spinning platter should not be considered no matter what the USB connector technology is. The first question to ask yourself is "What is its intended purpose?" If it's to backup files as a way to archive data, the time to make the backup is not a huge factor, and it will not need to be regularly accessed, any of the USB thumb drives will do. I find that there's very little difference in price between a name brand and generic USB stick so spend the extra few bucks if for nothing else than the warranty. If you are actually accessing data of this drive and want to use it as you would your internal drive, USB thumb drives are not ideal. Sure there are high-end thumb drives with extra features and faster memory but they will give you a fraction of the speed and reliability of of a NAND-based drive. These drives are referred to as Solid State Drives (SSD) and even at their lowest end, outperform just about every USB flash device ever produced. This technology used to be quite pricey but now it's standard for manufacturers to use for internal drives and as the prices for memory have dropped, has become the standard for active external storage as well. SSD technology has also evolved and improved as well so that now the USB speed is the limiting factor on how fast these devices operate. (see NVMe) You can run programs directly from the drives and not miss a beat as if it was a hard drive. This video was confusing so I thought I'd throw in my two cents. Hope it helped.

[rtester]

people selling fake usb drives by changing the chip inside that tells the computer how large the usb drive is. I bought a couple to test them and most of them only had 512mb - 4gb actual disk space

[UnlimitedSwass]

If these are scam why is Amazon so slow to remove the sellers before they accrue over 1000 purchases ?

[MP-vgug]

These are 32gb sticks reprogrammed to show higher amounts. If you copy a over 32gb of files they will show in a directory listing but will not work. They just keep overwriting back to the start of the flash memory. The raw dram chips cannot be made at this price

All usb flash drives comes with some form of preloaded data, that's why I like to format it in NTFS and set my own data storage limit.
I worked with many USB flash cards through the years, thanks for showing us looks like there's a scam going around. Thanks for the warning ⚠️

[davec]

well I have learned a lesson. Wish i had learned it for less than 20 bucks rather than 33, but it is hard to scam me, so congrats to them for that. I think what got me was the thing was on Amazon and had generally good reviews, but I figure that is because people were reviewing after storing 10s of GBs of data, not trying to store 100s.... Guess I'll have to go and find a decent SSD now.

[SaveAmerica-TRUMP]

yeah I wanted to go SSD for my important photos. I though something was fishy with these cheap thumb drives claiming huge storage numbers. The biggest LEGIT thumb drive i could find is a 500GB corsair for $129. I looked into sandisk/ samsung external SSD drives but was not happy with the occasional bad review sprinkled in among the good. Claiming data loss/ drive freezing up during data transfers. I think I will just go grab another old school 1TB external hard drive and hope for the best....

[ymelfilm]

I bought a 1T stick, different brand, I made it NTFS, still working, sure slower than my hdd. Still shows 1T capacity. I even edit shortvids on it with premiere.

[BobscratchTurntablist]

1TB (1000GB) - Mini Metal USB Memory Stick Flash Pen Thumb Drive Data Storage £7.99 E-bay
i just bought it this morning, before watching this video.

[haydar]

Can i use in ps4 storage
And can i know how much speed is this flash drive
And thx

[FreemonSandlewould]

It's like the guy is chewing gum while he's speaking but he's not!

[ForsakenSingularity]

God forbid you get a Kingstick -- they *say* it is USB 3 but is crawls like a snail :(

[hotord]

thanks for the nice informative video 👍👍

[Yeaimjohny]

This isn't a good USB flash drive. I bought a 500 GB flashdrive but after using 50 GB of it with pics and vids it started to eject on its own by just the slightest tap or movement on the USB when inserted Into the tablet. Plus when I try to add anything else to the USB it will supposedly transfer but when I look for it the video or pic is nowhere to be found so I assume it was just deleted because its not in the tablet and not in the usb. This thing is terrible wont buy this USB again. I got it from ebay by the way.

[redfeathersa]

YES IM GETTING 2TB Flash Drives Corrugated Metal Keychain USB Flash Drives Pen Drive Flash Memory USB Stick U Disk 1TB Storage "ERROR 0X80071AC3 THE OPPERATION COULDNT BE COMLLTED BECAUSE THE VOLUME IS DIRTY" FFS !! WHAT A CON. NO HELP OR CUSTIMER ASSISTANCE FOR IT!!
.... BOUGHT FOR 11 QUID . 3AITING FOR AGES FOR IT TO COME. AND I GET THAT ERROR ON TRYING TO SAVE ANYTHING TO IT !!

[simonevans]

So glad I'm a Mac user. Windows is so 1990's. Yawn.