OT 1TB flash drive for £8.50 on Ebay

That's the usual con.

I got burned that way with a fake USB memory stick. It was very, very, very convincing - even the packaging looked right. It wasn't even that cheap. I told the seller I'd report him if he didn't refund my money, which he did. Then I reported him anyway.

In case the O/P isn't aware, there are tools to check for fake sizes

It's a con.

I'm a Linux person, so none of these are appropriate. I worked it out myself with mkfile and dd. But by the time you have the drive and they have your money, it's too late ...

I use this on FreeBSD.

Perhaps 1TB is the model number and not the capacity? :-)

Owain

The other con is that they were made as 1tb and are knackered and remapped to just use available good regions. Sadly these dodgy drives tend to get worse so are the exact opposite of secure back up systems. A friend om mine has got a big drive, but its very small. it does not seem to work in some usb sockets at all, so I wonder if there is a problem with powering them or drivers? Anyway, many seem very slow to me. I am on the look out for a very simple reliable system I can back up many computers onto in different partitions, what do the folks here think is the best course to take. a big ramstick that works or just a plug in usb drive partitioned into several smaller ones? Brian

But the sign says '24 hour cleaners'!

That's just the name of the shop, dear.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band :-)

Are any of the reputable manufacturers even making thumb drives larger than 256GB ?

I couldnt find any.

there are 24 of us and we clean for 1 hour each

tim

The idea that a flash memory has degraded so that less than 1% of it is still useful is a nonsense

They are usually considered as sub standard if less than 98% is unusable

It's also impossible to use them at all if the first block doesn't work as that's the one that's needed to contain the mapping to the good bits

There is no chance at all that a stated 8gB flash has a 1tB chip (or combination of chips) inside, and any attempt to pretend that it has using this "knackered" nonsense is a fraud.

tim

Unfortunately, ebay seem to make it deliberately hard to report this. The 'report an item' form doesn't allow entering any text, so you're just forced to choose from a predefined list of criteria, where 'listing is full of lies' isn't an option. If you select the nearest one it just submits the report, without any option to justify why.

Nearest I could find is Listing practices -> Fraudulent listing activities

-> You suspect the listing is fraudulent

which is probably worth doing anyway. Maybe if lots of people do it they'll take notice.

Theo

I once had such a poor response from eBay staff when I was sent the wrong goods (it led to long discussions which went nowhere) that I don't have faith in eBay putting anything right.

A low rating for seller feedback seems to have more effect.

I have bought from many good sellers on eBay but the effort needed when you get that one bad seller doesn't make up for the good experiences. I generally stay away from eBay and prefer to make purchases I'm prepared to throw in the bin if it's wrong.