This is just to inform other buyers of a peculiar kind of a product that is currently sold by many sellers on eBay. I won't link to any particular listing, because the same apparently identical product appears to be sold by many vendors, but they all share the same images and have a similar description:
So that's a 2 TB external SSD drive, somewhat quaintly described as "USB 3.0 High Speed Type-C 2TB External Mobile Solid State Drive Storage Phones", sold for just $30-40 apiece. Too good to be true? A friend decided to find out, and bought two. I got to test one of them, and this is what I found out:
* The write speed is pretty low -- around 7 MB / sec, i.e. ca. 20 GB/hour on my Dell laptop. (For comparison, an older WD external HD I have writes about 6-7 times as fast, ca. 45 MB/sec). So it would take around 100 hours of writing to actually fill the drive with the data, if it had the advertised capacity. But that's a big IF...
* I started copying a large directory tree of mostly images and PDF files to the drive, around 300 GB in total size. After about 15 hours, the writing was completed, and I took a look at the written data. The first subdirectory is fine, the second is fine is well, and so on... until you look through about 120 GB of data. Beyond that, any additional data subdirectories weren't even readable, not to speak about files in them.
* I did a few more additional tests, copying individual files or directories to the drive, comparing them with the originals, and then deleting them. For some files it seemed to work fine, but for others (esp. ZIP and MP4 files), you see that the file is corrupt, even though a correct file size is shown. Once you start reading them back, you see that you're just reading 0xFF bytes (a byte with all bits set) back instead of most of the blocks of the data.
So my overall impression is that what's inside the case is probably something like a 128 GB flash memory unit, and some circuitry which makes it pretend to be a 2 TB drive. I have read about some scams like this elsewhere ( e.g. https://www.ontrack.com/en-gb/blog/how-to-spot-a-fake-ssd ), but did not quite expect to see an item like this "in the wild".
Unlike the blogger in the article linked above, we did not actually break the cute little device open; the vendor has a good refund policy, so we were able to return the items for a full refund. But I don't know if one would be similarly lucky with all vendors selling this product... so, buyer beware! Make sure to at least test a product like this if you buy one!
I was also a victim of this ridiculousness. China is flooding the market with all kids of fake SSD's, thumb drives, and SD cards. Recently, I purchased a "1TB" SATA SSD for one of my customers that didn't want to spend over $100 on an SSD. Initially, the SSD seemed to work, but I was unable to clone a mechanical drive to it that had about 240GB of data on it. As soon as the drive was about 25% full, it slowed down immensely and I couldn't copy any more data to it. The machine booted, but it took upwards of 15 minutes to get to the desktop. Upon further examination, I found that the drive's "model number" was an MZ-76E500, which is a 500GB Samsung Evo 860, but the name on this drive was SAMXNUG as in the photo. My guess is that it's a 240GB drive with an altered, low-quality I/O chip that makes it look like a "1TB" drive to the machine's BIOS. Once 240GB was reached on the drive, it failed shortly afterwards and I was no longer able to read or write to it. There are a number of vendors selling these fake drives, and this has cost me a lot of extra time and effort to buy another drive locally, reinstall the customer's machine, go back to the customer's site and set everything back up, pack up the bad drive, send it back, correspond with the seller. What a mess. . . .
