Can you beleive your operating system? No you can’t!
We notice that sellers of fake flash drives on ebay (either deliberately or through ignorance)
sometimes show screenshots of drive properties shown by the operating system. This only shows what the control chip tells the operating system. Often this information is false. Do not be fooled by it!!
Control chips are easily programmed by fraudsters to show a fake capacity to the operating system. There are two ways of checking whether flash memory is genuine or not:
1) fill the drive with files from your computer (do not move them – just copy them – otherwise you could lose them all!) then try to access the files – if you exceed the real capacity (usually less than 4GB) you will find the files are unusable. This is the hard way to test!!
2) Download the program h2testw and test it with this. Unlike the above method (which is time consuming and often renders flash drives unuseable) this program does not destroy the drive unless the progamming was really bad!
If you find that your drive fails either type of test please report it using the report a fake tab at sosfakeflash, giving as much detail as possible.
Bought 16GB mp3 player from “fleabase” on ebay. Immediately tested by writing 15GB to drive and after 4GB written, rest was corrupted. Took drive apart and found flash memory chip model #0920 WP 29F32G08CBAAA A9H2B. I looked this up and found it is 32Gb which is 4GB. Just for grins I ran H2test with the following results:
Warning: Only 7397 of 16344 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
3.8 GByte OK (7984073 sectors)
3.4 GByte DATA LOST (7164983 sectors)
Details:3.4 GByte overwritten (7164983 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
0 KByte corrupted (0 sectors)
8 KByte aliased memory (16 sectors)
First error at offset: 0×00000000f3a79200
Expected: 0×00000000f3a79200
Found: 0×00000000f3a77200
H2testw version 1.3
Reading speed: 5.13 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
I have opened up dispute with paypal. I still have the mp3 player. Not sure it is legal to send it back since it is counterfeit. Any advice? Thanks.
Roger Mallory
July 8, 2009 at 4:38 am
You should never return fakes to the seller – there are several reasons, not least of which is that in most countries sending fraudulent items through the postal system is an offence. Another big reason is that it will almost certainly lose your refund! Please read the refund advice on the sosfakeflash blog – do not be swayed by the automated messages you will receive from paypal – computer generated, not from a sentinent being!
fightflashfraud
July 8, 2009 at 7:47 am
vs-passion was confirmed. This seller is scarey.
See http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/vs-passion-ebay-fake-flash-seller-alert-china/
Also see
http://www.toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=vs-passion
Please contact other buyers -quickly!
KittyFireFlash
July 26, 2009 at 6:02 am