Fake SSD's, still a hidden bargain?
So there is a great charity shop near me called "Newlife Plus", they seem to mostly sell amazon/retailer returns, imperfects and end of line products.
They sell most items at one of a few price points £1.99, £2.49, £3.49 and £4.99.
They do various multi-buy offers eg
- £2.49 items are 3 for £5, or 7 for £10,
- £3.49 items are 2 for £5
- £4.99 items are 3 for £10
They frequently have tech products I have picked up some truly great purchases (retail Windows and Office licence keys, network cables , USB speakers, game controllers) , many ok products and on occasion some real stinkers.
This blogpost, dear reader is about a slightly stinky purchase, but one that with the aid of some metaphorical deodorant I think is ok.
I paid £5 for both of these drives, apparently stating they are 2TB on the box
Pictured to the left is one of the drives in its packaged state.
Make note of the packaging, remember it then avoid ever purchasing it
To the right is a picture of the back of the box.
Spoiler warning: it has many lies printed upon it, except the made in china and price at least one of those may be true.
Pictured to the left are the contents of the package
- The external drive
- USB-A to USB-C cable
- USB-C and MicroUSB adaptors
As I knew there was a very high chance this is not what it claimed to be. I decided to test the drive capacity and find out what this thing actually was.
On Linux there is a great command called f3. As I use Debian I simply installed it by running "sudo apt install f3"
Its a 'scary' command line tool that runs as root and may well make you cry by destroying your data if you mistype or look at it wrong (its like dd that way). IF you choose to use it do so at your own risk (maybe buy some tissues first, it may stop your tears from shorting something) .
After I installed it I "sudo su", then like a mad person ran "f3probe --destructive --time-ops /dev/fake_drive_designation"
The output (which may take some time) looked like this
As you can see not only doe the command tell you what the drive capacity is, it provides a command to 'fix' the drive by partitioning the good part for use
Now the drive has been partitioned in this was I was able to format the drive to a usable file system, by running "mkfs.exfat /dev/sdc1"
Now when it is connected to a PC it is accurately identified as being a 62.2GB drive.
While this is not the huge bargain it appeared to be at first £2.50 for 60GB is not a bad deal.
Now that I had a usable drive I was curious as to the speed of the enclosed drive..
I ran "hdparm -t /dev/drive_designation" to see just how fast my drive was.
I received the reply rather quickly, it was an underwhelming 21.71 MB/sec, so the drive may be useful for pictures, documentation or configuration back ups...
Although this was not the end of this adventure, not just yet.
On the retail packaging it described itself as being a m.2 portable hard drive enclosure, Dare I dream that I may swap the currently present drive for another to get a true SSD experience? (spoiler: No I couldn't)
The drive was really awkward to access, although I carefully worked the rear end cap off, this allowed me to move the internal caddy forward to reveal the 'drive' within
Hotglued into the internal caddy was a custom PCB with single flash chip and controller. I was unable to clearly read the text on the chips unfortunately this means I am unable to advise which chips they are. The PCB does however clearly show CF-866 on it.
Its a shame these cannot be upgraded by swapping the board for a true m.2 drive, however I don't think its too bad of a deal overall.
Just remember that if something looks too god to be true it probably is.
I want to thank you for reading this entry, its appreciated, if you want to comment or continue the conversation about fake drives or charity shop bargains, I am available over on the Fediverse here so give me a shout or a follow
This has been my first post in over a year, if you would like me to post more often (or less often) you can always buy me a coffee and tell me which I should do via the fediverse.
Jase