Fake SSD Scams (Worse Than I Thought) - Krazy Ken's Tech Talk

- Oh, wow. Can I buy this eight terabyte SSD for only $99? Sold. This is a bad idea, right? Sponsored by Linode. (whistle in the air) Hey guys, how are you? If you are new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken and

fake

SSD flash drive

scams

have plagued the internet for years and it's finally time to address this issue. We'll take a look at an example of a

fake

SSD product and then I'll show you some ways you can spot these things in the wild so you don't get fooled. And then I'll show you some tests you can run so you can see if these things live up to the claims.

So let's take a look at Londoncomfy. (air whistle) I found out about this company from one of my viewers, Marianne, through a Twitter DM. Londoncomfy's website states that it is an English family business specializing in retail products. They have many categories on their website, many of them with broken thumbnails. And overall, the giant, unfocused list of products gives me a really cheap feeling. And something that puzzled me was this photo of its founder, Margot. When was the last time you saw a real CEO of a serious company posing with his own company logo on his shirt and on a mug?

That looks like a stock photo to me. A quick reverse search proved it. We can see many other sites using the same model for their t-shirt and mug renders. So we can reasonably conclude that this founder is totally fake. And if a brand lies about the name and face of the founder, I can only imagine what other nonsense is going on under the hood. Oh, and that phone number in the footer, don't even try it. Does not go anywhere. We're off to a great start and we haven't even tried the product yet. The SSD product page gives you five storage capacities, ranging from 500 gigabytes to eight terabytes.

And it claims that this SSD is fast with file transfer speeds of 520 megabytes per second. Is that possible in the real world? Absolutely. Solid state drives are typically faster than mechanical hard drives and can store terabytes of information in a really small space. Instead of using a platter with magnetic particles and an actuator arm, SSD stores data on a chip using electrons, a series of gates, and more architecture that is beyond the scope of this episode. This allows the drive to store a large amount of data in a compact, quiet space and allows the computer to access it very quickly, but are we really going to get fast speeds and high capacity with this product?

Let's continue investigating. The Londoncomfy website also offers us a fake countdown to the 25% sale. And this is just a scarcity marketing tactic to give you some urgency and make you want to buy right away. Now, I want to make a disclaimer on this because I've

talk

ed a lot about this. Not all countdown timers are bad. A countdown timer on a website does not automatically mean that a product is a scam. There are legitimate uses for them, but when a website uses them and they're just repeated over and over again and don't actually lead to anything that actually expires, that's a little suspicious.

Here's a way to try it. (air whistle) Take the web page you're viewing, copy the link, paste it into an incognito or private browser window, and upload it. If the timer changes, it is likely a fake countdown. That's the essence of the Londoncomfy website. And that brings us to the first real problem with this product, the price. (air hiss) The first big red flag for me was that they were selling an eight-terabyte, 520-megabyte-per-second SSD for just $99. That sounds too good to be true. Now, consumers who aren't versed in the

tech

nology space may not realize it, but that doesn't really make any business sense.

In 2022, if you bought a true eight-terabyte M.2 form factor solid-state drive, you'd spend at least $1,000 on the cheaper side. If we look at a 2.5-inch form factor with the same capacity and similar speeds to what Londoncomfy advertises, you're still looking at about seven times the price. So there's no way for Londoncomfy to take a $1,000 cut, put it in a venue, and profit from a $99 sale. It is impossible. So always check prices. If you see a cheap device, look for it on another website to see what equivalent products are sold for. And if you need help, don't hesitate to ask someone you know who is more versed in the

tech

nology space because they will have a better idea of ​​the market.

So with this crazy website, a BS countdown timer, and ridiculous prices, you'd think I'd run away from a product like this, but of course I went ahead and bought one. (air hiss) I bought the eight terabyte model and boom, the purchasing process was really easy and less spammed than a lot of my other research. So I'll give them a gold star there. And it arrived. I think it took a couple of weeks, but it didn't arrive in that fancy shopping bag the website shows. What a shame. Anyway, it's here. So let's take a look at it. (air hiss) The box has no brand names or any mention of Londoncomfy, which is not surprising because it is probably just a generic product from China.

Ah, made in China. Check it out. And the box advertises USB 3.1 speeds, which in theory would offer pretty fast data transfer speeds, but we'll test that soon. And inside the box we find the disk, the USB cable and two adapters. USB-A to C and USB-A to Micro B. And these instructions. When using desktop computers, data cables should be connected to the USB interface behind the main cabinet, such as a filing cabinet. The power supply on the tront's USB interface is generally unstable. Butter fingers, who am I, Linus Tech Tips? Don't shake your body when accessing data with a mobile hard drive, such as SSD body or just your body in general.

Don't do this when using a hard drive, it is very dangerous. Number four, don't fall. Like in general? I mean, yeah, it's generally good advice. Physically, the device looks good. It has a metallic finish. It's small and compact, but now let's plug it in and try it for real. (duck quacking) Oh, they spelled flash wrong. It will be a long day. (air hiss) Anyway, I tried formatting this in HFS Plus. The process took about two minutes, when it normally takes a few seconds. Finally, the formatting finished and I ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test on the drive.

And the speeds were atrocious. One megabyte is written per second and the read test doesn't even run. I reformatted the drive as ExFAT and tried again and interestingly I got 11.3 write and about 18 read. Better, but still total shit. Side note: If you're using Windows, you can use CrystalDiskMark to test your drive's speed. So the speed claims are false. And in the real world, if you tried to do serious work with this with large files, it would be virtually impossible to do, but I didn't stop there. I opened this device in the macOS System Information app and the speed was recorded as 480 megabits per second, which is the theoretical speed of the older USB 2.0 standard, which is much slower than advertised, USB 3.1.

If this were truly a USB 3.1 Gen 1 device, that speed would register as five gigabits per second, about 10 times faster in theory. So we have confirmed twice that the speed claims are false. Certainly this product couldn't be

worse

, right? Let's test the capacity. (air whistle) I am using a Windows program called H2testw. This test writes thousands of one-gigabyte files to the SSD and then checks them to calculate the actual capacity of the device. For a check, I tested a USB flash drive that I trust and the test showed no errors. Great, let's move on. For this eight terabyte drive, the test needs approximately 96 hours to run because the speed of the drive is very slow and it has many bits to read and write.

And of course, Windows Update restarted the computer in the middle of the test, so I had to restart from the middle. Thanks Windows, it's not like I have anything better to do with my life. I actually don't, so it doesn't matter, but don't worry. I hit the pause updates button, so now we should be good. The test lasted 39 more hours and then was interrupted again. I think because I hit the USB cable. It's very loose compared to a normal cable, but that doesn't surprise me. This thing is cheap crap. Either way I had the data I needed and I couldn't justify restarting the test again because it takes days to run.

The final results show that 58.2 gigabytes of data are fine and 3.1 terabytes of data were lost. And 164 gigabytes of data were overwritten out of a total of 3.37 terabytes verified. So only 58.2 gigabytes of data can be stored here, which is actually a lot less than I

thought

it would be. I was giving this product too much credit, but I wanted to go beyond a simple trial program. Now I want to try this with a real-world application, something I do all the time: video editing. (air hiss) I reformatted the drive as HFS Plus for macOS and am copying a 400+ gigabyte Final Cut Pro video editing library to the drive.

The transfer was incredibly slow, but on the surface it appears to have ended without errors, but of course the data was behaving erratically. The size of the final cut library was reported incorrectly in the Quick View window compared to the Finder window. And the library wasn't open either. I searched the library package to examine individual files. A movie file that was within the 58.2 gigabyte limit opened correctly, consistent with the test results, but all other movie files were corrupted. So, despite appearing in the operating system as an eight terabyte volume, it can actually only handle 58.2 gigabytes, which is less than 1% of the advertised capacity.

So how does this trick the operating system? Is that how it works. (air hiss) The flash storage chips on an SSD board need a brain to communicate with the rest of the computer. This brain is a controller that is usually a separate SOC or system-on-a-chip on the board. The controller uses firmware so that it can function and communicate correctly. And firmware is a type of software that is programmed directly into a piece of hardware. However, this firmware can be deceptively programmed so that the controller tells the operating system the wrong capability. And as I have shown, this SSD does not give you the advertised speed or capacity.

It's not even close. So let's open this up and see if we can figure out what parts it's using and maybe that will give us more clues as to why this sucks so much. And first, I have to give a special thanks to Noah-n Cares, Lane Wallen and Toby The Greatish. You guys helped me research this episode and I really appreciate it. Alright, now let's open this thing. (upbeat music) Okay, so this thing is full of glue. It really seems like they don't want you to come in or that was just their lazy way of securing the components.

So the glue was an issue and I've seen some mixed results about using alcohol to dissolve the glue, but I've heard that heat works well. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that until I deployed my caveman skills and simply sliced ​​and tore the thing into pieces. Unfortunately, we only have a few scraps in this bag, but it still helps get my point across. This is literally just a micro SD card that accommodates USB-C. Here is the card broken in the process, but you can see from the contacts that it is a micro SD card, not an M.2 SSD.

And that surprised me because I

thought

it was going to just be a cheap storage medium like you'd find on a USB 2.0 flash drive or something, but no, it's literally just a micro SD card. And I'm going to assume that this chip is the controller that has the fake firmware. And the funny thing is that the scammers shaped the case to look like an M.2 SSD would fit in there, but clearly this board doesn't fit that spec. I should also mention that Atomic Shrimp recently released an episode on this topic. So feel free to check it out too.

Coincidentally, he dropped that episode while I was working on my own. Almost like he was spying on me. Relax Ken, no one is spying on you. I know, I'm not paranoid. Anyway, yeah, it sucks, but if you use Linode they will give you the speeds and capacity you actually pay for. They do it right. If you have an app or website that you need to scale or deploy, Linode has the infrastructure and 24/7 support you need, but the good thing is that Linode is much more than just data centers. (air whistle) Linode offers ready-to-use apps for game servers like TF2, CS:GO, and even Minecraft.

You can run your own virtual private network with OpenVPN, create an online application with the Joomla content management system, orCreate a video streaming site with a multitude of app options. There are many things you can do with Linode's affordable Linux virtual machines. Plus, they offer award-winning 24/7 technical support. Simply put, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Visit linode.com/computerclan and click the create free account button. And when you do that, I'll give you a $100 credit for 60 days, just for watching this episode, a good deal. And you're also supporting the Computer Clan. So thank you very much.

So be careful of those fake SSDs and flash drives. And the biggest red flag, I would say, is the price. Check those prices because, after all, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Well, that was a lot to go through. Now I have to store all this footage for this episode. Well, I hope I used a reliable SSD Ha ha ha ha (upbeat music)