Are Your Flash Drives Mostly Fake? (Worse Than You Think)

Here's how to tell 🤔

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
1:23 - ValiDrive
2:10 - Demo With Fake USB Drive
3:42 - Demo Results

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[SGgrc]

@ThioJoe : Great job showing ValiDrive! (which I wrote) I think I'll link to this video from the program's home page since many people would appreciate seeing it go! Thanks! :) And very slick additional graphics to clearly show what's going on. Very nice!

[markcruise]

Can we take a moment to appreciate that this is a fully functional windows application that isn’t dependent on any installed runtimes and it’s 95KB. Steve Gibson writes all his utilities in assembler.

[UXXV]

Steve is nearly 70 years old and has been coding in x86 assembler for 40 years continually producing the SpinRite drive checking software since the early 80s. He also publishes Security Now the podcast which has been going for nearly 20 years too. That could explain the old timey style of the software, and thats why the EXE size is so small - its hand coded assembler.

[MarcioHuser]

The Monochrome Map is intentend for the colorblind people. Although most can still see that the colors as different, with different shades, it would be better for them if the difference is more noticeable

[blunderingfool]

The reason for forcing the user to re-plug the drive may be a sanity check so the user can't test anything but the drive they intended. Also the program sounds like it'll be great for finding out if a drive is dying, how useful! :D

[Ryan_DeWitt]

Amazon really needs to be more motivated to crack down on these scams. They are literally everywhere on amazon and blatantly obvious.

[TheLegndHimself]

Wow - just realized 3 USBs I have are fake and I am getting my money back from the merchant as we speak - you literally just saved me like 50$ because of this video - THANK YOU

[CubyDoesStuff]

It's surprising that no scammer has yet used reasonable prices so at least the product wouldn't look suspiciously cheap.

[earlt]

I just tested my 1TB flash drive and it's coming back as only 32GB. Thanks for the video.

[rollercoasterbee]

As I've stated in a comment on another video, I had that happen to me back in 2016 while I was on a cruise. I was given a supposed 128GB MicroSD card for Christmas 2015 to use in my digital camera for taking pictures during the cruise. I did not know that the family member who bought it, bought it from Ebay for $10. The reason I didn't know is because they wanted it to be a surprise. Well, in a nutshell, when the cruise ship was docked in Florida (we were going to the Bahamas), I took over 200+ pictures with my digital camera and when I went to view them on my camera, because I didn't have a laptop with me, I discovered that almost ALL of those Florida pictures were completely lost FOREVER and I was beyond angry when that happened. I will NEVER purchase ANY type of storage device from Amazon or any other website like that, unless it is cloud storage, I will go to a physical store to buy it outright.

[Jerios]

3:39 the monochrome view is most likely meant for people with color blindness or vision problems. That's likely the reason it exists.

[bigbrother]

Steve Gibson's GRC products are top notch. Used his stuff for many years, always Red Hot and accurate

[balisongman]

I actually used the old german software back in the day that filled the drive up to see how much it could write. Yes it took ages to do but called out a "Samsung" micro SD card I got on eBay back in the day. Now I only buy from Samsung's Amazon store directly. It looked authentic in every way

[davidg]

I got a fake USB stick long ago. Ever since then, I've only bought flash memory devices with brands I recognize and only from reputable dealers less likely to end up with counterfeits. Never had a bad one since.

[anon_y_mousse]

I've only ever had one fake drive in my possession. It did this weird thing where the writes basically went to a looping queue, so every write was successful and up to the real size of the drive could be read back accurately. It was super annoying when I had some data and the only part left intact was the end of it.

[brute_force_and_ignorance]

That was a great tip! I've been using Heise's flash drive tester, but that one is brute force, mow the lawn, solution and takes hours to crank through 400 GB of flash. Validrive finished in a couple of seconds. My hit rate on fake drives is about 33%, since I tend to buy cheap, and the cheap ones are more likely to be fake.

[Buzzygirl]

This is great, thanks Joe. I recently bought a Samsung 128 GB flash drive and just tested it using Vali Drive, and fortunately it's a genuine 128 GB. The test was very fast. I bought this drive from Micro Center so I wasn't really worried about it being fake but I certainly would hesitate buying one off eBay or Amazon at this point.

[GamerBossY]

Thank you for telling me that my school project is gone. A "64 GB" usb stick is only 8 GB. Now I can recreate it.

[G.S.Holland]

You bought the exact one I got.

I also bought a different 1TB flash drive before that one. The first one I got turned out to be 8GB. I figured it was just defective because it wouldn't play any videos I put on it.

So I got the one you featured in your video. I am confident it ruined my front facing USB drives it was that bad.

I reported both fake drives/sellers to amazon and they responded by taking down my one star reviews I left to warn other shoppers. But amazon then deleted my review.

I unloaded righteous indignation on them through an online chat after they took down my "verified purchase" review. They ended up putting my review back up after I blasted them for the decision.

But I don't really care my review is back up. The fake flash drive is still for sale.

Amazon doesn't give two squirts of a rat's butt that people are being conned on these things. I guess they figure as long as they allow returns and refunds, their customers should clap and be happy like beached seals and not care they allow scammers to proliferate on their website.

[charleslord]

Nice that there's finally A quick tester - I wrote A drive tester when I suspected A "2TB" drive of being fake (it was) but it took FOREVER to run.