Well-known online stores offer 2TB USB drives and 128TB external drives at ridiculous prices. But don’t fall for it: these are fakes that obviously don’t keep their promises.:
USB keys and external disks are very practical accessories, and even essential when you want to store and transport files, to use them on different computers or on various devices, whether to retrieve office documents or to play videos on a television, for example. And like everything related to storage, you can never have enough because you always end up running out of space to save new files! Fortunately, the prices of these precious accessories have continued to fall in recent years, at the same time as their capacity has increased. And today we can very easily find 64 GB USB keys for less than 10 euros and 1 TB external drives for barely 50 euros.
But if you hang around online stores to make your computer purchases, you have undoubtedly already come across even more attractive offers, with very large capacity removable storage devices offered at ridiculous prices, such as USB sticks of 2 TB for 5 euros or external SSDs of 128 TB for 25 euros. This is particularly the case on well-known platforms like AliExpress or Temu where dozens of sellers offer this type of product at incredibly low prices, in various versions, and sometimes under reputable brands, such as Lenovo or Xiaomi.
But there you go, Santa Claus doesn’t exist, and these are simply scams! Despite the numerous photos, the beautiful technical characteristics and the rave customer reviews that these merchants highlight on their profiles, these very large capacity USB keys and SSDs are vulgar fakes. We verified this by purchasing several products. Certainly, they arrived within the announced time frame, and they work. Better yet, the models we tested perform well within the advertised capacity when examined on a computer.
The catch is that this is an apparent capability, which has been cleverly faked at the factory in the internal firmware – the firmware – of the device, in order to deceive the operating systems. And if we can fill them out at first glance, we quickly realize that the copied files simply become unreadable, because they gradually self-destruct over the course of the recordings. Because the space actually available is much lower than the capacity announced: for example, it is 32 GB for a supposedly 2 TB key!
Worse still, the recording speed is very significantly lower than the expected speed for the promised standard: we thus noted a copy speed of 4 MB/s on a key supposed to reach more than 100 MB/s, as would be the case if it was indeed the USB 3.0 standard. In short, these are just disguised products: keys and disks of a few gigabytes with the USB 1.0 or 2.0 standard. that dishonest sellers try to pass off as cars. And, to tell the truth, it’s hardly surprising when we see that their prices are barely higher than those of classic, lower capacity models, which should alert you…
Above all, there is currently no key or SSD that really has the characteristics announced, because the necessary electronic memory chips are not on the market! There are 1 TB USB keys available, but usually around 100 euros. And Samsung, which is one of the main manufacturers of chips and storage systems, has just presented an 8 TB external SSD sold for almost… 600 euros. We are far from the prices of these miraculous products, to avoid absolutely! The real question that arises is why large online platforms still let these unscrupulous merchants sell this type of product. Especially since this scam is not new…