Fake USB Drives

Now I think all of us know the existence of fake USB drives with real capacities way smaller than the claimed specification (no, a 8GB pendrive with 7.8GB capacity is not fake). And I think most of us know about the nifty little app H2testw which writes on your entire USB drive to test the actual capacity. But what I just found recently is a whole different level of cheating altogether.

Looks just like any other Kingston flash drive doesn’t it? Aside from the rather amazing stated capacity, it looks pretty normal to me. But wait. It wasn’t detected when I plugged it into my laptop. I wonder what’s wrong.

Upon taking it apart I was shocked to find NO MEMORY CHIP at all. As in it’s just plain PCB with some capacitors soldered on.

Just sharing this to remind our readers out there to be aware that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Always buy your gadget and memory from reputable resellers and shops to avoid being cheated, especially if you need it for work purposes. Imagine if you copied a presentation into a fake USB drive and when you were about to present it the next day, you can’t find it.