Have you seen 16 TB SSD external drives sold at very low prices on stores like Amazon? Above all, don’t buy it: it’s a gross scam that has already claimed many naive victims.
There are bargains and false bargains. Certainly, when shopping these days, especially on online stores, it is always wise to compare prices and go in search of the right plan, especially in times of generalized inflation. This is particularly true in high-tech, where prices fluctuate enormously: it is not uncommon to see products offered on promotion with 30%, 40%, 50% reduction – or even more – on their price. usual, whether computers, peripherals, accessories, smartphones, televisions or headphones, during sales or special sales. But there are limits and, above all, real scams, with deals that are too good to be true.
Thus, as several experts have recently spotted, we are currently seeing what could look like the ultimate good plan on reputable online stores: external drives of the SSD type with a capacity of 16 TB – yes 16 terabytes! – sold for less than 100 euros. We have even seen some less than 70 euros on Amazon ! Very nice peripherals, with beautiful colored metal casings (red, blue, gold, silver, etc.), which, in addition to their incredible storage capacity, promise high performance – a speed of 500 MB/s, for example – compatibility with almost everything – PC, Mac, smartphone, tablet… – thanks to their USB 3.0 or 3.1 interface. In short, the kind of versatile accessory at a crazy price!
16 TB SSD: a simple low-end memory card in a nice case
Of course, this is a gross scam. Several specialists have verified this by ordering, testing and dismantling these so-called external SSDs which do not offer the capacity or performance announced. Some have thus noted a real storage capacity of 32 or 64 GB with an effective speed of 15 MB/s, which is the equivalent of a bad USB key in USB 2.0. And for good reason: these pretty devices do not contain a real M2 SSD as promised: instead, in their very empty entrails, there is only a simple memory card reader with a poor quality card. All associated with a microcontroller – a chip in charge of managing storage and transfers – often referred to as Chipsbank CBM2199S: a model which has the advantage of being able to be “flashed”, therefore reconfigured, to display fictitious characteristics, in particular a capacity canister storage. Because, the strongest thing is that this fake external SSD appears as a 16 TB removable storage device in Windows Explorer, for example! Scammers really stop at nothing!
It goes without saying, we strongly advise you not to buy this kind of product – we find it under several unknown brands, at variable prices, but always very low, and similar descriptions. The confusion is easy to detect for experts: the advertised price is just indecent, because it is incompatible with product costs and totally out of step with practical prices – it takes around a hundred euros for a 1 TB model. But Unfortunately, we can imagine that uninformed users fall into the trap thinking they are getting a good deal. The real question is to know why this kind of product is still on sale on Amazon, because there is clearly deception on the merchandise… Quick, the DGCCRF !