4TB SSD

He has already taken one apart

Is this worth my reporting to Amazon or do I just forget it? Obviously I haven't ordered it so I suppose I have no evidence.

Whilst true, that depends on the power available from the USB supply. My rPi4 could not run a 2.5" hdd without additional power.

Not only that, but the external USB power to the 2.5" hdd back-powered the rPi4 via the data USB3. Eventually, the rpi4 USB3 socket stopped working. Presumably due to damage from back-powering. Fortunately, the rpi4 USB2 is fast enough for CCTV,

There is almost a "standard" for building these.

What makes this work, is some register on the thing can be set, where the device "proposes" it has a larger capacity than the physical device. If the user "writes past" the physical end of the SD inside, the information is not recorded. And relatively simple capacity testing will tell you that you have been scammed. Just keep adding files with known checksums until the full 4TB are occupied, then attempt to read all the files back.

I even had an individual on USENET, try to convince me they hadn't been scammed. And they told me they had successfully written

Fortunately, the SD card glued into the device, is a Class10 or a Class10 reject. Which is why, when one person benched their fraudulent chariot, it only did 7.81MB/sec.

It is possible that newer SD Express controllers are not candidates, if they don't have the (unconstrained) register to declare a ridiculous size. It's this particular controller chip (with its limited appetite for SD flash size), that makes the scam fun for the people at the selling end. It must be quite satisfying for people getting that much storage for such a low price, to discover there is no free lunch.

The thing runs at roughly the same speed as an 8GB MLC stick from long ago. Except the NAND used, won't accept quite as many write cycles as a nice MLC would.

They used to do these, for the "1TB" and "2TB" sized devices, where the 2TB one was "only" 50% more expensive than the 1TB one.

At the time these fraudulent ones showed up, the companies making legitimate ones at or close to that size, announced they could do it, but they did not enter the market, as they did not want to be associated with "enabling" fraud. As a result, only the fraud ones could be purchased, while the real companies making real products, would mostly go to 256GB with only the occasional 512GB sized product. Nobody wanted to sell their perfectly functional 1TB one, because then it would be confused with the ones sold for 1/10th or 1/20th of the price they were charging.

That situation has changed today. And the fraudsters, not to be outdone, have dialed up their capacity just a bit, to in effect play the game that was being played ten years ago. Always be a bit higher "capacity" than the legit devices.

I really wonder how wide that register is, and whether it is a 64 bit register so I can have my 40,000 TB device :-) The largest fake storage I've been able to make on my PC to date (in a VM), was a 500TB device.

As for the notion of Amazon "shutting down" this scam. LOL. Hell will freeze over first. The company name will be selected from the four billion possibilities of a random name, and the same old pictures will be rolled into the advert. Including the notion that the thing is actually waterproof (maybe on the blunt end only).

Paul

This is what I used, very useful.

for the sheer hell of it I have bought a couple of external HDDs from Amazon and then used H2testw to check available memory.

I would then cut and past the results in a review. And of course get my money back.

Interesting. I just tried to follow that link and it now fails. Maybe Amazon decided it was so dodgy it would make them look bad.