Fake Flash Adventures

I recently purchased a “256 GB” flash drive for $3. I knew this had to be fake, but I was also curious about how it worked. It turns out that there was a “256 GB” micro SD card inside of it and I’m pretty sure that’s fake.

I didn’t get this on Amazon, but here’s a link to basically the same generic thing:

https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Flash-iPhone-Android-Memory/dp/B074G17N36/

Here’s a copy of the Amazon item page as of the writing of this post.

Using the great program H2testw I was able to determine how much actual storage the device had:

Warning: Only 255988 of 255989 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
29.5 GByte OK (62042393 sectors)
220.4 GByte DATA LOST (462221031 sectors)
Details:1.1 MByte overwritten (2300 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
220.4 GByte corrupted (462218731 sectors)
1.0 MByte aliased memory (2160 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x00000007644c3200
Expected: 0x00000007644c3200
Found: 0x0000000000000000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 9.09 MByte/s
Reading speed: 10.3 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

Turns out, it’s a little under 30 gigs. Well, at least I’ve got a good 30 gigs I can use :)

Of course, I’m not going to trust this for anything important at all, so I’m going to stick it in my Nintendo Switch to use for extra storage. If it fails, then I’ll just need to re-download any games stored on it. No biggie.