A free tool to quickly detect counterfeit flash (2017)

I bought a (little too) cheap large SSD off the internet. It was surprisingly slow, but it seemed to work fine, so I assumed that's the reason for the low price - until I tried to backup my other SSD on it. After the first ~50 GiB, all the writes suddenly failed and I could only perform reads.

After re-formatting it and attempting the backup a few more times, I was frustrated, so I searched the internet for related problems and found out about these so-called "chinese scam drives" that announce size to the drivers that is much larger than actual, and just throw away any writes above some memory address.

I quickly found f3 and tested it - and sure enough, it was a chinese scam drive. I reported the seller to the local inspection and they confiscated all the other drives and gave them a huge fine. I feel pretty smug about it.

Just received 2 cheapo 64GB micro sd cards from aliexpress, they seemed legit, had tons of reviews with OK crystaldisk performance screenshots and... they're junk This tool quickly identified that they were counterfeit of type "Limbo", with 16GB of capacity instead of 64GB. Thanks to Michel Machado for writing this gem.

For anyone looking for tools that do this, it seems like a good opportunity to mention Steve Gibson’s Validrive tool [0] if anyone out there is trying to help family and friends who might be scared off by a CLI tool, and I believe it’s non-destructive.

I’m glad to see more awareness of this issue and entrants into the space.

- https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Does anyone have any experience with mass testing flash drives as part of an assembly line?

Another tool for testing flash drives that was recommended to me was H2testW.

The tool brings a huge problem. You need to buy one to know it is fake, thus making the counterfeiter efforts successful.

Bad product reviews on the sales site won't work as they can be easily circumvented if not removed.

Bad product reviews on 3rd party web site won't be effective as well.

I think the right tool is a website to show updated buck/TB prices. So we can avoid buying fake devices. The proem is how/who would keep those data up to date. And how to make that site a popular choice for buyers.

Once got a cheap "Sandisk" SD card from an Australian ebay seller, which had much less capacity than what was displayed when it was plugged in.

After I tried to store more and ran into issues, I did some investigation and found out that it was a counterfeit Sandisk.

I emailed a screenshot with proof to the seller. Because of the very good consumer protection laws we have here, I got my money back.

There's no need for this.

Buy name-brand storage from reputable sellers.

Of course the fantastically cheap stuff on Alibaba is fake. You don't even have to check.

I got a few new USB drives at work for testing data centre hardwares. I normally would run f3 on new flash drives but this time the deadline is so rushed so I skipped that. Then I wasted an hour diagnosing a mysterious problem, and eventually I found out the usb drive is faulty after testing it using f3.

I then tested all of them and found out 4 out of 8 of them aren’t faulty, some of them died and disappeared.

So test your hardwares, test your hardwares that’s used to test hardwares. You will never know you can trust them unless proven.

Edit: badblocks, SMART test, memtest86 and memtest86+, prime95, Intel burn test, OCCT, iperf3, etc are equally useful.

I can't be the only one who read the title and thought this was about detecting a counterfeit Flash player.

This tool has a function to "correct" the capacity. I can't understand why that would be useful, I would not trust a device like this at all for any purpose.

Has someone made a flash drive tester as a standalone hand-held device? That would be useful for buyers and incoming inspection. Haven't found one yet.

I sort of wish there were places that sold new 2Gb drives as honest 2Gb drives rather than pretending they're 512TB. There are plenty of use cases (i. e. for a Gotek/Flashfloppy setup where 2Gb would hold more software than ever existed for the host machine, or as a cheap item you don't need to ask for back when you loan it to someone).

It's great that I can spend 10 bucks and get a competent 32Gb drive, but if we could get around $1, we could treat them as semi-disposable as floppies were.

2011, I bought a counterfeit Kingston card over Amazon. At the time this was not cheap

https://i.imgur.com/4XeaX.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/FZEYA.jpeg

I tried to fill in a warranty claim when I ran into problems. No dice. I always make sure the seller is quasi official now.

Steve Gibson of GRC (SpinRite, Security Now podcast, etc) made a free Windows tool specifically for this called ValiDrive:

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

If you are a Windows user, ValiDrive seems like the much easier choice.

Many comments assume (quite naively) that Big Marketplaces have no idea that it happens, and are fooled by shrewd counterfeit sellers who are always one step ahead. I suppose it is a complete fantasy, and those marketplaces have precise analytics on how big is the market of selling crap to illiterate consumers. If they voluntary abstain from that, and ban swiftly, they'd simply let competitors feast on that crowd, which would be bad for business™. Therefore, the handling of negative reviews, refunds, and fraud detection will always leave just enough margin for cheap counterfeits to be sold. As long as they both profit, it's a controlled dumpster fire.

This website traps me on mobile, can't use the back button. Fennec on android