A user buys a new hard drive, but it doesn’t work properly. When his son opens the hard drive, he’s in for a big surprise. Because inside, there’s nothing resembling a hard drive in sight.
A user purchased a completely new hard drive for his system. And 20 TB is quite a lot. But the device doesn’t want to function properly at home on his computer. For this reason, he turns to his son, who should take a look at the purchased model.
He opens the device at his home and is astonished when he sees the inside. Because instead of a hard drive, he finds half a dozen iron weights glued inside the plastic casing. There’s not much to see of a hard drive. He shares his find in disbelief on Reddit.com.
Fake models feign Windows storage space that isn’t even there
Why has the fake product only now been noticed? Fake models like this one are usually delivered with a fake controller unit or fake software that tricks the operating system into believing there is plenty of storage space available on it. In reality, the existing storage is only a few GB large.
Fraudsters use this “trick” with very large hard drives, SSDs as well as USB sticks. Typically, it is particularly models that are already advertised with large storage capacities, such as USB sticks with 16 TB of storage or other absurd sounding numbers. The player on Reddit writes himself:
It shows up in Windows as a 19-TB drive but hangs when you try to do anything with it. I believe I saw something similar with USB sticks in an LTT video [Linus Tech Tips]. The small board reports to Windows that it is a huge drive that actually has no storage space.
We have also warned about such fake models available for purchase on Amazon: Here, SSDs with 8 TB are sold for 50 euros, but often it’s a counterfeit product behind it. In general, a glance at the reviews is sufficient to see if the SSD doesn’t work or is fake.
You can protect yourself by using common sense and not buying models where the storage space and the price are not ridiculously far apart. An SSD with 8 TB for 40 euros is simply (too) absurdly cheap.
Another player wasn’t as lucky with the refund. Because he also got a fake product, but Amazon refused to refund the expensive graphics card. Only after external help did Amazon respond to the desperate family’s plea: Gamer buys graphics card on Amazon, receives fake product – seller refuses refund
