Chinese magical hard drive

[mzkhadir]

http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html

Image on website.

He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.





The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China... They opened up the drive right before the astonished customer's eyes. This is what they saw:




It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive.

The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Yep, ran into this one time with a flash drive from Hong Kong.

It was supposed to be 16gb, but it was really just a 2gb flash drive. They placed a 16gb controller on it, so in Windows / Linux it showed up as has having 15.xxgb free, but when you tried to copy more than 2gb to it, it would fail. It even had an autorun.inf with trojan preloaded on it.

The vendor was kind enough to refund the money.

 

[Lean L]

This is old news. They put a cheap chip in there and then flash the controller with the wrong information. It looks like it's the right size because the computer reads that from the controller.

I've bought one off ebay once. It turned out to be free after I disputed the charge lol. I actually managed to flash it back to the proper information and got a free 4GB drive (advertised as 16GB)

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

Yea this happened to me.

My friend ordered a 128GB flash drive. It read correctly. After he bought it, he informed me about it.
I got it, had issues the moment it was first used. Any data loaded onto it disappear into oblivion. It read exactly as 128GB. Instead of what it should have read-117. Had to go through hassle of claims and shit with Paypal, but did get my money back without having to waste money shipping back to China.
My friend hasn't had an issue with his drive in the year+ he's had it. Dickhead.

 

[TheSpy007]

So basically never buy electronics from china/hong kong?

 

[jacc1234]

So basically never buy electronics from china/hong kong?

So no electronics at all for you then?

 

[Lean L]

So basically never buy electronics from china/hong kong?

never buy anything designed for the chinese market is more like it. Their production under the supervision of some other designers isn't notably bad.

 

[BoomerD]

So basically never buy electronics from china/hong kong?

I sincerely wish that was an option...but sadly, the corporations have sold everyone out in the name of higher profits.

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

So has China surpassed Nigeria in the amount of scams yet?

 

[Modelworks]

On flash controllers they still have an eprom that the flash controller reads at power on, sometimes it is stored in the flash itself. That information can be set to just about anything you like. You specify things like usb ID, chip sizes, etc. You can even do it with drives you already own using the proper software. If you want to know the true size of a drive open the drive in a hex editor as a physical disk, not the volume, and look at the last reported sector number. That correlates directly to the size and cannot be faked by the controller firmware.

 

[hofan41]

On flash controllers they still have an eprom that the flash controller reads at power on, sometimes it is stored in the flash itself. That information can be set to just about anything you like. You specify things like usb ID, chip sizes, etc. You can even do it with drives you already own using the proper software. If you want to know the true size of a drive open the drive in a hex editor as a physical disk, not the volume, and look at the last reported sector number. That correlates directly to the size and cannot be faked by the controller firmware.

As someone who has worked on usb controller firmware for flash drives, I can tell you your method would not work for determining the capacity of the drive if the firmware were written correctly to fake the capacity.

 

[Jeff7]

Other fun stuff: Plain copper slugs being used in counterfeit Atmel chips, from last year.

 

[marvdmartian]

personally, as a mechanic, my favorite part is the hex nut on either side of the chip, to give it some weight and (I'm guessing) keep the chip from being bounced around.

 

[DesiPower]

So the news is about being cheap and buying shit from shitholes? or shitty ass people living is shitholes producing innovative shits to cheat the world?

 

[BabaBooey]

I have a real nice in the package kingston 32gb micro sd,dude put it in his phone,showed up as it was real till I got home and tried to format it....

I did get revenge as I had his plate number......:ninja:

 

[DeadlyXboy]

I have a real nice in the package kingston 32gb micro sd,dude put it in his phone,showed up as it was real till I got home and tried to format it....

I did get revenge as I had his plate number......:ninja:

I would say it's really difficult to buy a real kingston(though there are a lot).......IN PRC

 

[Jeff7]

Suddenly I feel compelled to make a Mobius Strip tape drive.

 

[0roo0roo]

well in china the only things that matter are making money and hating the japanese:awe:

 

[DaWhim]

So has China surpassed Nigeria in the amount of scams yet?

nigeria is childplay compare to china in scams. we should be glad that chinese don't speak english.

 

[DeadlyXboy]

well in china the only things that matter are making money and hating the japanese:awe:

in this period people in China are apparently living the way you said.....
BUT JAPANESE ......You should know .......no reason not to hate them in some aspects as if you are a Chinese......()

 

[DeadlyXboy]

well in china the only things that matter are making money and hating the japanese:awe:

Nowadays Chinese have lost a lot of their good traditions
now most of their metal world are blankness because of some reasons....

 

[wwswimming]

It was supposed to be 16gb, but it was really just a 2gb flash drive.

i assume this doesn't apply to the Corsair Voyager 16 GB -

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233042