one terabyte USB flash drives are just starting to come on the market but they're very expensive
this one here is selling for over $800 so I was quite surprised when I came across this eBay
listing for a Sony one terabyte USB flash drive selling for $50 with free shipping especially
since according to their website Sony does not officially sell any USB flash drives larger
than 64 gigabytes of course I'm well aware of the existence of fake counterfeit flash memory
media but usually they at least try to copy a product that actually exists and this one was
coming from a u.s. seller while most of the fake flash memory media comes from China so I decided
to pick one of these up of course obviously it's going to be a fake but I'm just interested to see
what the actual capacity of this is and there's a program you can use to test that to make sure that
the flash memory media you get regardless if it's a USB flash drive or an SD card or a memory stick
or even a compact flash card you can test it to make sure it's actually the capacity it claims to
be so here's the $50 eBay special the first I'm running a test on this PNY 8 gigabyte USB flash
drive I've used it with a bunch of different operating systems Windows Macintosh Linux and
haiku so I know it's good I filled it up to its entire capacity and it's not had any problems of
data corruption so I'm running a test on it using a program called h2testw it's a freeware download
and when you first run it it comes up in German but you can change it to English and you can use
it to test USB flash drives or any other kind of media takes a couple minutes it's been running for
about 6 minutes so far but it will test your drive to make sure it's holding the entire capacity it's
supposed to so here's the USB flash drive they gone from eBay there's a nice sparkly effect on
the packaging does not say the capacity on the packaging but if you look closely at the drive
itself it does say 1 TB so it claims to be one terabyte and neither of those are the correct
sony logo and that's not the windows 8 logo either that's the windows 7 logo says it's for netbooks
laptops and desktops mobile phone flash USB 2.0 has two different sizes of USB connectors on it
more fake Sony logos on the back for Windows and Macintosh and a whole bunch of badly written text
here says for Android Mac OS Windows and Linux systems calls itself a U disk never heard that
phrase before there it says something about noosy mobile U disk I don't know if that's supposed to
be an anagram of Sony or something I don't know course made in China and here's our test result of
the PNY 8 gigabyte flash drive says it finished without errors writing speed 10.3 megabytes a
second reading speed 14.7 the capacity was 7712 megabytes so now back to the fake Sony Drive and
they just noticed the drive they show on the picture here is completely different than the
one that's actually in the packaging and I'm going to try to open this without totally tearing up the
packaging as I most likely will be returning this although sometimes I know if you complain to eBay
about an item not being legitimate they give you your money back without even asking you to
return it so maybe that will be the end result of this so here it is a fully minor tearing up
of the packaging does come with protective covers over the terminals and on the other
side it has a fake vaio logo on it so I'm going to stick it in the computer here and see what
capacity claims to be this little red light and the end of it and I heard the Windows USB sound
found a general u disk device it's installing the drivers there now it's installed and ready
to use it showed up as a removable disk F: let's see what capacity is it claiming to be so here
we go properties 976 gigabytes or just above one trillion bytes it's a fat32 format so I'm
going to run the test program on it so here's that h2testw program again select that drive
using all available space and I'm going to write and verify and this will probably take a while so
I'll come back when it shows its results and there is the red LEDs flickering away as it's writing
data to the drive well so far has gotten past four gigabytes I know some of these fake USB flash
drives regardless of what capacity they claimed to be they're actually only two gigabytes so maybe
this one is the least eight gigabytes actually I have to correct myself because I just realized
this is just the writing stage it hasn't gotten to the verifying yet and usually what happens
with these fake USB drives is that when they reach their actual capacity they just start overwriting
the existing data so this will probably actually claim to have written one terabyte of data to it
although by the time it reaches that much it'll just have overwritten itself multiple times and
corrupted anything that existed there so we'll have to wait until it gets to the verifying stage
see what the actual capacity is so that means it could take almost three days for this thing to
finish writing is not doing too fast it's quite a bit slower than the other flash drive was it's
over 24 hours later now and it's going even slower now that's really slow for a USB 2.0 flash drive
so even if this was a 1 terabyte drive I wouldn't want to use it just because it's so slow so this
is going to take at least three more days to finish finally after 83 hours of writing is now
verifying the drive it appears to be a 2 gigabyte Drive in reality because you can see it's written
almost 79 gigabytes so far and 77 gigabytes have been lost so I'll wait for that to finish which
will take another 35 hours so here's the end result it says seven 7.3 gigabytes were okay
and the rest was lost so it's probably actually an 8 gig drive and part of the difference is because
that's measured in binary gigabytes which is what Windows uses and they advertise these drives and
decimal gigabytes so that's closer to seven and a half gigabytes and those are the speeds which
are much or than the real 8 gig drive i tested before i already asked the seller on eBay for a
refund so far he has not responded to me but if he doesn't get back to me by tomorrow the eBay
Customer Support will step in and they probably will just give me a refund so I'll see how that
turns out so here's the end result the seller never responded to my request for a refund so
after a few days eBay customer service stepped in and they gave me a refund directly so I got
my $50.00 back and I don't have to return the item there are utilities available to reformat a fake
USB Drive to its true capacity but these utilities are coming from websites in China and Russia and
the programs are not in English so it seems rather sketchy to me and I would not recommend it because
you don't know if the flash memory chips they use are even reliable because that's obviously not
their concern so you don't know if they're using chips that got rejected from the factories that
make reals USB flash drives it could be the chips they're putting these things wouldn't even hold
data even at the correct capacity that they were designed for so I definitely would not trust one
of these fake USB flash drives even if you can manage to reformat them to their true capacity