If you’re shopping for an external SSD or USB stick with a high storage capacity at a bargain price, be cautious. The market is currently flooded with counterfeit storage devices that may not deliver on their promised capacity.
These fake devices use manipulated controller firmware to trick the operating system into believing the device has more storage than it actually does. For example, a supposed 4TB SSD may only contain a 64GB chip. The controller is programmed to acknowledge write operations successfully, even when the physical storage is full.
Once the actual capacity is exceeded, the drive may overwrite old data or discard new data, while the file system reports an intact structure. This can lead to error messages or corrupted files when trying to access stored content.
It’s essential to verify the integrity of new storage devices upon receipt. The operating system alone is not a reliable indicator of a drive’s capacity. To check for counterfeit devices, use tools like Validrive, which scrutinizes every bit of the drive.
Launch Validrive with administrator rights and select ‘Check USB Drive’. After inserting the storage device, click ‘Validate THIS drive’ to initiate the check. The tool writes to random sectors across the entire declared range and reads them back immediately, measuring access times to determine if there’s a physical cell behind each logical address.
How Counterfeit Storage Devices Operate
Validrive effectively verifies storage device integrity by writing to and reading from random sectors across the claimed capacity. Its analysis of access times reliably detects whether a physical cell corresponds to each logical address, quickly identifying counterfeit devices.
