by Charles Miller

Years ago I purchased a package of perhaps a dozen USB thumb drives. These ubiquitous devices are also known as flash drives, memory sticks, jump drives, etc. On Amazon the package of no-name flash drives I bought was very attractively priced, considerably less than the same size brand-name drives.

Over the next few months I used those flash drives many times without incident. Knowing that all flash drives have a finite life and they do wear out, I was not at all suspicious when one of them did. I always follow the data safety protocol that says you never ever store the only copy of any irreplaceable file in one place only. For that reason I never once lost any important files, therefore I was never motivated to spend any time investigating what happened when one of those failed. I just tossed the worn-out flash drive in the trash and started using another. After just a few months all dozen of the drives were gone.

Then this week I along with much of the Information Technology world experienced a huge “Ah-Ha” moment upon hearing the news that a very large number of bargain-priced solid state drives have their internal electronics fraudulently programmed to lie about their size. The disreputable manufacturers who do this are able to get away with it because it is forbiddingly impractical to verify the actual size of a solid state device. This really is almost the perfect crime.

When you buy a drive labeled with a capacity, for example, of 256 gigabytes you trust that this is how much data it can hold. When that drive reports to your computer, phone, camera, music player, etc. that its size is 256 gigabytes your device also trusts that to be true. This trust breaks down when a dishonest seller lies about the size. This always goes undetected because when a drive fails we just assume the device has reached the end of its usable life.

About the only way to detect this chicanery is to copy enough files to the drive to fill it to its stated capacity, and then do a byte-by-byte comparison of the original files to the copied files. Simply listing the files on the device is not enough because the LIST of files on the disk will be complete even when the files on the list were never copied and do not actually exist. But testing all 1,099,511,627,776 bytes on a 1-terabyte drive could take many hours. There is also the fact that testing the drive, just like using it, slowly wears it out.

So, what can we do to protect ourselves against this scam of fraudulently-labeled flash drives? There are some test programs, but they are far from ideal because of being very slow and they fatigue the drive being tested. Probably the best advice is to avoid those TGTBT (too good to be true) low prices on flash drives and stick with the more expensive name brands.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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