if you're watching this you're probably familiar with counterfeit flash memory storage devices
which advertise attractively large storage capacities at prices which seem to be too
good to be true and that's because they are too good to be true I did a video about one of
those back in 2015 which now has over two and a half million views but I'm not here to talk
about those all these USB thumb drives you see here are legitimate but some of them including
some from well-known brand names cheat you out of a little bit of their advertised capacity
I first discovered that when I had this 128 gigabyte SanDisk USB drive which actually is
128 gigabytes I'm gonna put it in my Mac and use Disk Utility to show its true capacity
there it is 128.04 gigabytes so yes indeed this drive does give us 128 gigabytes so I
was happy with this and I wanted to get another one well I found this from SanDisk you can see
it's quite a bit smaller and now it's a USB 3.0 drive so it's a lot faster than
the old one and it also claims to be 128 gigabytes except when I plugged it into my
computer I discovered that its real capacity is only 124 gigabytes and here's that newer
smaller SanDisk Drive which also claims to be 128 gigabytes but if I put it in
click on it it shows up as only 124.22 gigabytes
so they're cheating us out of four gigabytes of its rated capacity
so I emailed SanDisk to complain about it and at first they insisted that the
discrepancy and storage capacity that I saw was due to the discrepancy between binary
gigabytes and decimal gigabytes they said "what you are observing is the difference
in the definition of one gigabyte by operating system versus product manufacturers operating
systems use a binary system which will represent a lower number of GB than the
decimal based system used by manufacturers to define the capacity of products" but that's not
actually true because I'm using a Mac which does measure drive capacities and decimal gigabytes
so I explained that to them and they wrote back "this drive does in fact have 128 gigabytes of
total memory some designs have slightly different user available storage due to
optimizations that are used for the performance and endurance of the products due to this the
available space for data storage is less on this flash drive" they said "I understand
that the explanation provided to you is not up to your expectation but this is
how the product is designed" and in another email they said "this is disclosed on our
packaging and marketing materials when you see the statement actual user storage less"
so even from a well-known and well-respected brand name like SanDisk there's a chance that
you're not getting the advertised capacity of the USB thumb drive or SD card or SSD or
whatever else you buy because of that statement "actual user storage may be less" so I'm going
to go through all these USB thumb drives and see which ones are actually giving us their advertised
capacity and which ones are cheating us out of a little bit of it and hoping we won't notice
on this side I have the well-known and well-respected brand names and on this side
I have some of the cheapo no-name ones but these are legitimate drives they're not counterfeits
here's a Lexar eight gigabyte drive
and indeed it has a true capacity of eight gigabytes let's see the exact amount 8,004,812,800
bytes so yes it is eight gigabytes exactly so that one is being truthful in its advertised capacity
a PNY 64 gigabyte USB flash drive
64.95 gigabytes so they're actually giving us a little bit more than the advertised capacity
a patriot XT Xporter four gigabyte drive
4.01 gigabytes so yes it is four gigabytes so we're doing okay so far
here's a PNY 64 gigabyte USB 3.0 Drive
aha 61.73 gigabytes not the claimed 64 gigabytes so they're cheating us out of a little bit of it
here's the actual capacity 61,733,863,424 bytes so this one is a cheater PNY shame on you
here's an older PNY Drive eight gigabytes
and that is whoops get out of that 8.1 gigabytes so we are getting our
advertised capacity a little bit above it so somewhere along the line just like SanDisk,
PNY went from giving us the actual advertised capacity to cheating us out of a little bit of it
here's a Verbatim drive it doesn't say its capacity
but it's going to be some kind of standard value or least it should be
store and go 31.14 I would assume that's supposed to be a 32 gigabyte drive but
again they're cheating us out a little bit of it I mean you could maybe say oh that rounds up
to 32 but not according to the math I learned if it was 31.51 I would say okay yeah it's rounding
up to 32 but not 31.14 so they are cheating us out of a little bit of it on this one as well
here's another PNY 64 gigabyte thumb drive
Untitled whoops and again they're cheating us out it's not 64 gigabytes it's 61.96 so
not even 62 gigabytes we're getting out of what is supposed to be a 64
gigabyte drive so far the cheating brands are PNY Verbatim and SanDisk
now here's an Enfain USB thumb drive made to look like a cassette tape but that's the actual part of
it I believe this is supposed to be a 16 gigabyte thumb drive so we'll see how much we get out of it
and indeed we're getting 16.11 gigabytes so that is the actual true capacity
recognize this? that looks like that PhotoStick or whatever it's called so
this is one of those no-name drives which they can print anything you want on them
I don't know what the actual capacity is supposed to be of this but we'll find out
two gigabytes and we do indeed get 2.12 gigabytes out of it so that is a true capacity drive
here's an HP four gigabyte drive I think I formatted this in Linux so it may not show up
as anything that it can recognize yeah it wants me to initialize it but I will initialize it
and here it is 4.04 gigabytes so this one is giving us the rated capacity
now here's one of those no-name drives Compucessory four gigabytes
these in my experience do give you the rated capacity
and indeed 4.02 so that's good
here's a totally no-name one I wrote on it 16 gigabytes we'll see what we get out of that
15.72 which rounds up to 16 so close enough not bad
here's a totally blank one I didn't even write anything on it we'll see what this one is
15.94 which rounds up to 16 so again pretty close not gonna complain about that
this one I wrote on it 32 gigabytes so far we're doing pretty good with these no-name ones
and 31.18 so that one is cheating us out a little bit of it because that doesn't round up to 32
so it seems like the higher capacity these go
the more you get cheated out of it because they think you won't notice
here's an older one one gigabyte it says on a sticker on there
EVP estate valuations and pricing systems with a nice keychain thing on it
no name 1.01 gigabytes so that is correct capacity
so all these drives gave us their advertised capacity within the limits of proper rounding
and this one by PNY actually gave us a little bit more but these drives cheated us out of
some of their advertised capacity two PNY drives which claim to be 64 gigabytes but were not this
Verbatim drive which claimed to be 32 gigabytes but wasn't this SanDisk drive which claimed to
be 128 gigabytes was actually only 124 and this no-name drive which is not actually 32 gigabytes
you could say this SanDisk is a ScamDisk these
PNYs are Partially Not Yours and this Verbatim is a Ver-bait and switch 'em
I never liked this thing anyway regardless of its capacity because it's so tiny that makes it
difficult to handle and easy to lose and also if you leave this plugged in for a long time it gets
very hot because it doesn't have enough surface area to dissipate the heat of the flash memory
chips inside it so I've been wanting to replace this anyway with something more conventionally
sized and to my dismay Amazon is still absolutely flooded with fake USB flash drives if you
search for a one terabyte USB drive on Amazon virtually all the results that come up are fake
so I thought it would be safer to go to an actual physical retail store like Best Buy to
get a USB flash drive that way it would be a much likelier chance that it's a genuine item and not
a counterfeit I thought I would give SanDisk another chance here with their Ultra USB 3.0
flash drive 256 gigabytes advertised capacity on the back again it says "one gigabyte equals one
billion bytes" we already knew that "actual user storage less" I looked at the PNY equivalent which
was a couple dollars cheaper and that one says it may be less but this one just says "actual
user storage less" so that's pretty much admitting it will be less than the advertised 256 gigabytes
so here it is it definitely is similar in size to the old one that actually did give
us its advertised capacity so we'll see if the same holds true for this although
I noticed the slide mechanism feels a lot cheaper than on this old one which is much
smoother in operation this feels like a lighter grade of plastic it's made out of
okay we'll see what it comes up as I'm betting we're not going
to get the full advertised capacity just like it says on the disclaimer
there it is and indeed we're only getting 250 gigabytes instead of the advertised
256 percentage-wise that's a little bit better than this one which lost
four gigabytes of its advertised 128 so if we doubled that this one would
have lost 8 gigabytes but instead it only loses six but I would still prefer a drive
that's advertised as 256 gigabytes to actually give us 256 gigabytes
and I think the proliferation of those fake USB thumb drives has actually emboldened the
manufacturers of legitimate USB drives to cheat us out of some of their advertised
capacity because they figure enough people have been burned by one of
those fake drives that they'll just be happy to have something legitimate and trustworthy
and even if you didn't lose data on one of those fake drives they're often terrifyingly
slow so when you compare the speed to one of these it'll be so blazingly fast in comparison
that they figure you probably won't notice that you're missing out on a couple gigabytes of its
advertised capacity and even if you do notice it you won't be bothered enough to complain about it
but I guess I'm the exception to the rule because I was bothered enough by to make this video