Watch out for fake flash drives

Informacja

All software described/linked in this article is for Microsoft Windows Operating System.

Recently my friend bought 128GB „Kingston” USB Flash Stick from some guy at eBay. He discovered that flash was fake. Remember, before buying USB stick read article detecting your flash disk real capacity and always try to test device before buying it.

Here some stats from our test, it was performed using h2testw procedure is described with details here:

  • Full write test time: 42h 15min 32 sec

  • Full read time: 8h 15min 3sec

  • Real capacity of 128GBs: 43MB :(.

The media is likely to be defective.
43 MByte OK (88064 sectors)
124.9 GByte DATA LOST (262023168 sectors)
Details:124.9 GByte overwritten (262023168 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
0 KByte corrupted (0 sectors)
64 KByte aliased memory (128 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000002a90000
Expected: 0x0000000002a90000
Found: 0x0000001f3ef90000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 861 KByte/s
Reading speed: 4.31 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

The USB stick has only 43MB capacity, but there were fakes, which capacity is almost 4GB and they can be fixed just by flashing controller.

My friend decided not to fix his device, but if you’re interested in fixing flash drives you should definitely checkout links below:

Remeber, after fixing such device you can’t rely on it - data stored can be lost anytime - so don’t use it for backups, and remember to format it with right tool.

Original flash disk should have engraved some numbers on end of USB plug.

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