Beware of very cheap hard drives: some have pen drives inside | Technology

The cheap external hard drive scam is back. On Reddit, some users show photos of external hard drives that are actually a plastic case with one or more pendrives inside.

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A 2 TB external hard drive from a trusted brand like Seagate, for example, right now costs 65 euros on Amazon. However, in some Chinese stores and even on Amazon with third-party sellers, 2 TB hard drives can be found for as little as 30 euros. Reddit users they remind us what beware of suspiciously cheap bargains.

This same week a user bought a cheap 1 TB external hard drive for his father, and he was surprised that by copying more than 30 GB, he was rewriting what was already saved. Inside there was a 32 GB flash drive glued on, as you can see in the opening photo.

Other users tell how they bought a 4 TB hard drive that had 4 1 TB partitions, but could only store 32 GB on each. When they opened it … They were 4 32 GB pen drives connected to a USB hub.

Not a new scam. The above photo is from 2011. But the reddit thread shows that it is a scam that continues to occur in 2020, both in dubious Chinese stores, and even on Amazon with third-party sellers.

The most sensible thing is buy trusted brands such as Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, etc., in stores with certified sellers. But that is not a guarantee either: the previous photo is of a HDD what had a Samsung case.

Of course, there are cheap reliable discs that do not offer any problem. But if you buy a suspiciously cheap one, the first thing you have to check is that it is not a scam.

We have already seen the first clue: many of these fake hard drives have a driver that shows false information about the size of the pendrive. But when using it, You can only put the maximum capacity of that pendrive. If you buy a 1 or 2 TB disk but there is only space for 32, 128 or 256 GB, start to suspect … Even if that space works for you, a pendrive is much slower than a hard disk.

Other clue is that you cannot delete existing partitions, or merge them into one.

The most practical is use a software tool that performs a disk scan. It will tell you exactly the partitions and the space there are. You can try for example with HDDScan O H2testW.

As we have said, you can buy cheap hard drives without a problem, but if the price is suspiciously cheap, or the seller or the store are unknown or do not generate trust, you have to be very careful, if you do not want to be victims of scams like this one.

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