EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE SIZE FRAUD

WHAT IS EXTERNAL DRIVE FRAUD

External Drive Fraud is a situation in which external drives report having more capacity than they actually have. It has been around since the early 2000’s, and it’s a global scam. The manufacturers or producers of these drives use refurbished or just plain used drives, and sell them for the price that a higher-capacity drive goes for. Making it happen is trivial in effort. It just requires modifying the value of a parameter in the firmware of the drive, or using a jumper across a pair of pins on the circuit board that will cause the drive to report differently. The triviality of the effort makes it worth doing for the fraudsters, because they’re buying used drives, modifying them, and selling them as new, for the price of a larger drive than they actually are. Even selling them at a higher-than-value price, they’ll still be a “bargain” price.

We don’t see it as much with external hard drives that use spinning platters, as we do with flash drives. It’s much cheaper for the scammers to buy the flash drives, and they can sell larger lots of flash drives to retailers than they can of external hard drives, which are usually sold in singles rather than in lots. The circuitry in external hard drives is also much more complex than in flash drives, which makes it harder to tamper with.

HOW CAN I TELL IF MY DRIVE IS TELLING ME THE TRUTH

If you’ve purchased a hard drive with a well-known brand name from a reputable retailer, you’re probably safe. However, if you bought a bargain brand drive from a seller you don’t know well, it may be worth verifying the capacity of your drive. Here are a few utilities that you can use to test the capacity of your flash drive, and this DOES NOT constitute an endorsement of any of the products:

• H2testw: H2testw is a free and open-source tool that is known for its accuracy in detecting counterfeit flash drives. It works by writing data to the drive and then reading it back to verify that the data is intact. H2testw is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• FakeFlashTest: FakeFlashTest is another free tool that is specifically designed to detect counterfeit flash drives. It uses a different algorithm than H2testw, and it is also available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• USB Flash Drive Tester: USB Flash Drive Tester is a commercial tool that offers a more comprehensive set of features than the free tools. It can detect counterfeit flash drives, as well as other problems such as bad sectors and data corruption. USB Flash Drive Tester is available for Windows.
• ChipGenius: ChipGenius is a free tool that can provide detailed information about your external drive, including the manufacturer, model number, and chip type. This information can be helpful in determining whether or not your drive is genuine. ChipGenius is available for Windows.

To test external hard drives, you can use general disk utilities like CrystalDiskInfo or HD Tune to check the drive’s SMART data and overall health status. However, these tools may not specifically detect capacity tampering as effectively as those designed for flash drives.

HOW CAN I PREVENT BEING A VICTIM OF THIS?

There are a few things that you can do to protect yourself from this scam.

1. Make sure you only buy external drives from reputable retailers.
2. You need to carefully read the product description to make sure that it accurately states the amount of storage space that the drive has.
3. You can use a third-party disk utility to verify the true capacity of the drive.

WHAT IF IT’S TOO LATE AND I BOUGHT A ONE OF THESE DRIVES?

If you think that you may have been the victim of this scam, you should contact the retailer that you purchased the drive from and demand a refund. You can also file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or the Federal Trade Commission.