What do you think are the chances that one of your USB flash drives is fake? Because there's
a whole bunch of fake drives out there that may say there's one terabyte of storage on
it or two terabytes. And when you actually plug in the drive, it may even say that.
But that drive is actually programmed at the firmware level to lie to the operating system.
And in reality, it might only have 64 gigabytes. Well,
there's actually a new cool tool I found that makes it pretty easy to check this,
and will literally tell you how much real space versus fake space may be on any flash drives. So
I went on Amazon and bought a blatantly fake flash drive that claims to have one terabyte of storage,
but of course it's not going to have anywhere near that, to use as a demonstration. But I want
to point out that these fake storage flash drives are worse than they may seem on the surface. For
example, you might think, well once you fill it up with 64 gigabytes of the real storage,
that it'll just say it's full and you won't be able to add anything else.
Well no, actually, the operating system will keep writing to it. And it'll actually add
the information about the file to the map (you can think of it like) on the
beginning of the drive. So it will look like those files are copied and
still on the drive. But really, they went into a proverbial black hole.
They went nowhere. So you won't realize that until you try to go retrieve those files
and copy off it. So you won't even know that those files are gone already. Okay,
now enough delays. The software I'm going to be talking about is called Validrive, and it's by
Gibson Research or Steve Gibson. He also created some software called Spinrite and some others.
And how this software works is it basically writes random data across
the entire supposed storage of the drive and then reads it back. And if it matches,
then it means that storage is real. Or if it reads it back and it's different or nothing comes back,
then that part of the drive is fake and it'll tell you what parts did end up being real.
And what's nice about this one specifically, instead of other tools I've seen that seem to do
the same thing, is that this one doesn't require you to fill up the whole drive. It just writes to
a distribution across the storage. So you don't have to test literally every single part of it.
So why don't we go over testing the software and show you how it works with this fake drive.
As you can see, this drive supposedly says it's two terabytes in size and it's exFAT
formatted. There's nothing on it at the moment. And when you launch the software,
it shows a bunch of information. And it does mention that you don't actually have to erase the
drive to use the Validrive software, which again is also different from other tools I've seen.
And apparently that's because the software, if it does test a region that already has data on there,
it'll restore it. So if you do have any critical information on there,
you might want to be better safe than sorry and just copy it off
first. But theoretically you could use it with stuff still on there.
Anyway, what you do is click check USB drive. And here, this part is kind of
clunky. Instead of just choosing the drive, you have to either insert it at this point,
or if the drive's already inserted, you have to unplug it and then plug it back in. Not
sure why that is. There might be a reason to it. Anyway, once you plug it in, it'll show
that it detected the drive and show the supposed declared size, or what the drive claims is on it.
And also a drive letter, if there is one. Then you can hit "Validate This
Drive" and it'll do some kind of calibration at first. And then you'll see that hopefully
it will quickly go through and just start writing to various parts. And this one,
for some reason, slowed down at one point very much and then sped up again.
I don't know, that seems to happen randomly for some drives. But you can see that a majority of
this device is indeed fake and only the beginning is real. And you could also apparently choose a
monochrome view if you want for some reason, but that's there too. After you hit Close,
it will show this report window thing and a bunch of info like the declared size again,
and also the validated actual drive size and show the same thing with the colors again.
And if you scroll down even further, it'll show some performance data too. Though I'm
not sure what units these are like bits or bytes. One thing I really wish is that you
could resize this window so that you could take a screenshot of the report
info at the top and the full colored table. That would be just kind of nice
for taking a screenshot to share, but I guess this is still an early version.
You can export the report as a RTF or rich text format or regular text
file though. I ran the tool on a bunch of USB drives that I have, and fortunately,
it doesn't seem like any of them are fake. I will point out that some of them seem to
start out fast and then again, slow down, seemingly freeze, but just go very slow.
Some of them are fast from start to end, like particularly, it seems like USB 3 ones are
very fast. I don't know what the difference is, but just be aware of that. You might have to be
patient with a couple of them. One thing I would note is if the drive is like fake and fraudulent,
you're probably going to see all the real data at the front and then everything fake after it.
But if you happen to see, I don't know, maybe everything's real except random
red spots throughout, that probably is just either like low quality memory or
some bad sectors or something like that. That might be just damage to the drive,
and I probably wouldn't use that if that was the case, but I haven't seen that in my case at all.
But anyway yeah, pretty simple video today. Just wanted to show you this. I'll put the link in
the description if you want to check it out. Let me know down in the comments if you have
any drives that you realize, "Oh no, they're actually fake." If you did enjoy this video,
definitely give it a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm.
And if you want to subscribe, I try to make videos about twice a week,
usually Wednesday and Saturday. And if you want to keep watching,
the next video I'd recommend is where I was talking about some special Windows
folders that you probably didn't know about, or maybe didn't realize some cool uses for them.
I'll put that link right there. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.