1TB Pendrive for $5-$20

[hojnikb]

There's one good thing about these scammers. You can "scam" them back. Morally questionable, but you can buy an obviously fake flash drive, test it and figure out it's fake and request for a refund. Very likely you'll get your money back and you got yourself a free 16-32GB flash drive. And since these chinese folks use common off the shelf controllers, it's pretty easy to program them back to their original capacity.

[Mechatrommer]

urgh? i dont want to get into hassle just to get back $5 and wasted my time pursuing. anyway, just ordered another 2pcs 2TB "HPSamsung" thumb drive @ $5 both incl shipping, i have something in mind

btw i ordered 30pcs 1GB Stick at around $1 each planning to give away as gift with small data inside it, and they arrived today. i thought it should not be scam right? i mean who bothered to scam 1GB stick? wrong! testing showed it only usefull up to 245MB, i tested 6 of them and they all consistently failed checksum at 245,500 KB. so this scam is all over from 1 - 2000GB, $1 - 2000 price tag...

anyway as far as my plan to make them as gift, i think they still can do the job as i will put data only few MB in there which should be ok, this is the cheapest thumb drive i can find online legit or nonlegit, so this scam won the lottery. if i need more for gifts i will not hesitate to buy again, its just for now i wonder if this thing has wear leveling technology active, if so, with repeated write-delete-write circle, one day eventually the drive will write to invalid place even if after format and emptied, i will find out this in not so soon time. again i dont think i'll have the issue for this particular purpose, since i will write once and send as gift. i tear apart one of them to see whats inside, just a potted sheet of plastics. so there need some more work to further dig what kind of flash inside.

ps: and also edited my feedbacks to only 3 stars including the first OTG stick i bought earliest, so i will not be so badass scambag.

[vwestlife]

As AtomicShrimp has discussed in his videos, these drives are likely factory QC rejects, and even if they weren't, the process of hacking them to report the fake capacity wipes off the drive's internal record of bad and unreliable sectors. So even if you reformat them to their legitimate capacity, I wouldn't trust them for data storage. Plus, they're terrifyingly slow, even by USB2 standards!

But as for the fear of them containing malware or being a USB killer -- that's not how the scam works. The whole idea is that for most users, at first the drive seems to be perfectly fine because they won't fill it up with enough data to surpass its real capacity until after the seller's return/rating period has expired. So the sellers get tons of positive reviews from buyers who think they've gotten a bargain and don't notice the scam until it's too late. This would not be possible if the drive had infected the buyer's computer with malware or exploded their USB port as soon as they plugged it in!

[Mechatrommer]

As AtomicShrimp has discussed in his videos, these drives are likely factory QC rejects... Plus, they're terrifyingly slow, even by USB2 standards!

i dont think so since there is no legitimate 2TB Flash Thumb Drive out there. this is hacking the MBR to report false capacity, the best i can guess. write speed test is around 5-10MB/s, read speed is 10-20MB/s, so its not so bad for USB2 standard, at least compared to my other legit flash drives here.

btw, just got my hand on AOMEI Partition Assistant (Free version) to resize Flash drive to their reliable size. i resized the 1GB flash to 250MB, and the 1TB flash to 14.5GB, checksum test passed so far. i'm not affiliate, just a happy AOMEI Free user (Backupper and Partition Assistant) https://www.diskpart.com/download-home.html

after watching Atomic Shrimp video i thought, he didnt go far, so i destroyed one of the 1GB drive to see whats inside. i believe inside the potting is a thin (0.4mm) 2 layers pcb with some USB + Flash ICs and some passive caps and resistors. but i cannot recover them from the potting (esp the ICs) since they are so badly fused into that, trying to break the pot will break the ICs. so trying to mod (upgrade) this thing from home is just next to impossible or a daunting task to carefully and perfectly remove/separating the potting from the smd components. but at $1 retail, the factory's price is probably like 50 cents? maybe production cost is like 10-30 cents? including the metal body with gold finishing? still amazing in my dictionary (i cannot make such product in such low cost).

[PlainName]

but at $1 retail, the factory's price is probably like 50 cents? maybe production cost is like 10-30 cents?

More likely it is zero. If these are QA rejects then they would otherwise have been binned, so they are a total loss. Anything they get for them is thus profit, even if that were 1c.

But... this is a zero sum game. Someone has paid the manufacturing and material costs. That someone is everyone who bought a non-reject product. The retail price covers everything: design, materials, manufacturer, shipping, sales, advertising, etc. Rejects would probably come under the manufacturing costs column.

The question is not so much how they sell these so cheaply, but who rakes off the profit. It is likely not the OEM but the contract manufacturer that rejects the parts before anything gets supplied back to their client.

[SVFeingold]

I really don't understand this thread. What are you hoping to achieve here? Obvious scam is obvious. News at 11.

Your time can't possibly be worth so little that buying ~200MB flash drives, formatting them, and giving them as gifts is a worthwhile endeavor. A cheap <200MB flash drive in 2021 is what we call "Instant Garbage." Other than as a learning endeavor I struggle to see the use. 

[Mechatrommer]

the thread has evolved, from curiosity (answered).. to further investigate the usefullness of this dodgy thing as a "hack" to cheap solution. the "gift" will matters if one is to give away hundreds or thousands of gifts, that recipients can use as a fixed data storage like DVDR (write once... or a couple). if reformatting the thousands is not feasible, just give them as is if you can suggest a non scam (legit) $1 200MB thumb drive, please forward, cheers.

A cheap <200MB flash drive in 2021 is what we call "Instant Garbage."

so far what i found out is your statement is untrue, but "Garbage" is a relative term, so i cant say that you are absolutely wrong cheers.

ps: what the wifey considered as garbage, i mostly keep and recycle them back into the lab, you can consider me as a badass hoarder of the weirdo stuffs it just so happened few minutes ago i just received a bag of broken rack from the kiddo since they learnt anything that can be mechanically or electrically functional, in however condition they are has to go through the lab, if it got signed, only then it can go to the garbage bin

[Mechatrommer]

i bought 2pcs drives similar to this at $2.50 each (averaged incl shipping)... https://shopee.com.my/Samsung-Metal-U-Disk-USB-3.0-Flash-Drive-2TB-High-Speed-Reading-Memory-Stick-Pen-i.308717336.9909165828 advertised as 2TB USB3, but unfortunately when they came, they only 117GB capacity (128GB drive?) a bit dissapointed because i cannot make a hack intended for them. nevermind... on to the data verification test, took many hours to fill each drive to 117GB (average 3-4MB/s write). at half way at 64GB, they passed verification test, so i continue until they are full. currently verifying all the data at 15-20MB/s read (after unmount and remount of course! to clear up disk caches). checking randomly with hex editor, all data up to 117GB seems legit, so its also a bit surprising to me that they have real 128GB meat in there. 128GB USB2 drive is still worth the money imho. so far my experience is mixed, on all the dodgy flashes that i purchased, but more toward positive side since they are not totally useless, in fact i can make them all really usefull for my need. the price is about right, as long as you look for the cheapest deal and dont go and hope for the price beyond maybe $10-50 nonsense... but this is of course purely my own experience and opinion, ymmv.

ps: i have to update my software to ver2 last night, to include filename tag inside the file data, to enable me eyeballing in hex editor, and the software automation ensures wrap around data is not happening (just in case). and "seed" blocks is now interchanging between non-random (sequential integers) and random numbers, just because for the purpose mentioned, we cant verify perfectly aligned wrapped around data on totally random numbers data (as used in ver1) either using SW automation or visual/manual check. and simple xor checksum is upgraded to yet another simple "xor and add 1" checksum to add more bulletproofness to detection of corrupted data "vector" i'm not intending to do running blocks/bytes type of checksum as i think my fixed (cluster aligned) block checksum can do the job without doubt, running block will not be bulletproof from perfectly aligned overwritten (wrapped around) data anyway, so thats why the need for human readable data at the beginning of the first block. the software will make "simulation data" (cluster aligned) until the flash is filled up to the set GB and creates sequentially numbered files (1GB each or until space is zero). following me so far? no? well, i attached the SW + VB source code, ver1 and ver2 in Original Post... fwiw..

edit: if one wonder why i waste my time to do this, its the same reason why others wasted their time reviewing T&M tools in youtube and here, except this is to test the limit of this dodgy technology (Dave did the same on some dodgy DMMs, tools and tech). and i wasted not much, since i can do other work while the SW is doing its job. and just typing here, no need hours of editing videos. the developed SW can be used in the future for other verification purposes. fwiw.

(ps: the SW is finished verifying, 1st run 117GB passed, i will keep the flash drives offline for few hours or days and make 2nd verification pass later to see if data can survive that long without power. in the mean time i will recompile and upload the SW ver2 (final touch up), retaining ver1 in this thread since i'm not going to keep the compiled exe any longer. here we go!)

edit: i tried Flash Tester tools in the net, they work sort of cluster/sector based verification, test is soooo long and no way to interrupt/verify in the middle of process. Windows Scandisk cant detect bad sectors on my previous 1TB drive, bummer! so i will use my own checksum tool for this cheers and best regards.