New Freeware Detects Fake USB Drives with Inflated Capacity

[FlyingPenguin]

Steve Gibson developed Windows freeware app also scans for read/write errors

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-f ... d-capacity

[Executioner]

Thanks for this excellent utility.

[FlyingPenguin]

Steve's been talking about this a lot on the podcast lately. In the process of working with beta testers on Spinrite 6.1, testers were discovering a lot of defective, or totally fake USB drives. So he decided to spin off a utility off that.

Going to run this on my drawer of USB flash drives. I don't expect any fakes as I only buy quality drives, but some are old and been used a lot.

Spinrite 6.1 is basically done. If you download the latest release candidate, it's pretty much what the final will be. Steve's mostly working on documentation and some language issues now.

Curiously, in the process of finishing 6.1, he discovered the bug in 6.0 that sometimes caused a Division Overflow error when scanning a drive over 549GB. He's released a patch for that, but I'm using the latest 6.1 candidate now so I really see no point: https://www.grc.com/sr/kb/b04e.htm

[Losbot]

Hadn't heard of fake USBs

[FlyingPenguin]

They are all over Amazon. Usually silly shit like a 6TB USB SSD for $30. People have bought them knowing they were scams, cracking them open on YouTube, and finding nothing inside but a 64GB SD card connected to a USB card reader, with the firmware hacked to make the card look like a 6TB drive. It works for a while, until you put more than 64GB on it, and then your files just disappear.

[Executioner]

Yeah I found a couple in my stash that were bought as USB2, but running the utility, it takes forever for it to finish on a 2GB drive. My guess is they are actually USB1 drives.

[Losbot]

I guess since I don't buy garbage or something that looks way too good to be true, I never ran into that.

[FlyingPenguin]

Steve's also come across non scam flash drives that just aren't very good quality.

I tend to buy good sticks, but some stick I have are pretty old so I tested them all.

[Err]

Thank you. This will be handy to check for counterfeit drives