Has This Ever Happened to You?

Have you ever received a gift from your daddy that turned out to be a disappointment? For some people, this has happened with a solid-state drive (SSD) that was purchased as a Christmas present. Unfortunately, these SSD scams are becoming increasingly common, and it's essential to talk about them.

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If you're new here, welcome! My name is Krazy Ken, and I need to revisit these SSD scams, especially the 30-terabyte model that was recently found on Walmart's website for $39. Before we dive into this episode, let me quickly update you about my last SSD company investigation, LondonComfy. Back in June, I released an episode about these alleged 8-terabyte solid-state drives from LondonComfy.com. Check out that episode if you haven't seen it yet; it's great.

A Few Follow-Up Tests

After making that episode, there were a few follow-up tests that I wanted to try and elaborate on, but they didn't quite go as planned. I accidentally broke the LondonComfy drives while trying to extract their guts, which means I couldn't test them further. Everything was kind of glued together in there, and I was being a little aggressive while trying to get inside. Long story short, it doesn't work anymore.

The Website Experience

So, I went back to the website and bought two more drives at the lowest capacity, on June 22nd, 2022. However, 20 freaking days later, I finally got a shipping notification, but another month goes by, and nothing happens. I emailed LondonComfy, deeply apologizing for any inconvenience caused, and they gave me a discount code. Yeah, Anna, I'm sure you're very sorry, if that's your real name.

The Waiting Game

Nothing happened for six more weeks, so I emailed them again, and to this day, I still have not heard back. So, I checked their website, and what a surprise! They vanished. The odds of me getting another LondonComfy product are slim to none, but I wanted to run some more tests, so I needed to look around for another drive that was similar but maybe still a bit unique and different.

Finding the Fake SSD

Thankfully, I found this insane SSD on a website called Wrapango, which has no idea what it's doing. The site claims a 30-terabyte capacity and read-write speeds of 1050 and 1000 megabytes per second respectively. Are those speeds even possible in reality? Absolutely! Thanks to an SSD's architecture, you can transfer data to and from them really fast and they're very compact.

The Price is the Red Flag

But is that the case with this product? Let's keep looking. I noticed the price was $89.90, but thanks to many viewer submissions, I found the same product on Walmart for half the price. So, that's where I bought it from, and it arrived no problem. However, it did take a couple of weeks. Before we open this thing up and look at it physically, there is one big red flag that I'd like to discuss: the price.

The Plausibility of the Price

As of late 2022, an eight-terabyte M.2 SSD would cost at least $1,000. So, a 30-terabyte product for $40 is way beyond plausible. Heck, even the previous scammers were charging $90 for eight terabytes. Multiply that by 30 terabytes, and $40 still seems insanely low. My advice is always to check the prices of similar products on other websites because if there's a big price gap between two products, that's a red flag.

The Red Flag Explained

Usually, this means the cheaper product is a scam or maybe it's just a tremendous pile of junk. If you can avoid websites like Walmart and Amazon when you're doing your research, I'm not saying don't shop on those websites, but when you're doing your research, be careful with those websites because almost anybody can list stuff on there, and that's exactly what we're dealing with today.

A Cautionary Note

Now, just to cover my butt here, I need to say this is not a Walmart-branded product. Walmart did not make this product, so cut them some slack. However, Walmart should do a better job at vetting these listings so people don't accidentally buy them.

The Product Itself

Let's look at the product itself. The product's design is similar to Samsung's T5 and T7 SSDs. It has a sticker reading "Made in China," which raises some suspicions. And it has a sticker reading "\\\\"

Testing the SSD

And it has a sticker reading "\\\\" which could indicate that this is not an original product from the manufacturer.

Conclusion

If you're considering purchasing a solid-state drive, make sure to do your research and be aware of any potential scams or mislabeled products. It's always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to technology purchases.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- Has this ever happened to you?Your daddy buys you a30-terabyte SSD for Christmasand suddenly your data is corrupted?I hate that.Unfortunately, these SSD scamsare plaguing the internet,so we need to talk about them.Sponsored by Linode, CloudComputing from Akamai.(upbeat music)Hey guys, how are you all doing?If you're new here, welcome,my name is Krazy Kenand we need to revisit these SSD scams,especially this 30-terabyte modelI found on Walmart's website for $39.But first I need toquickly update you aboutthe last SSD company I wasinvestigating, LondonComfy.Back in June I released anepisode about these alleged8-terabyte solid-statedrives from LondonComfy.com.Check out that episodeif you haven't seen it yet, it's great.After making that episode,there were a few follow up testsI wanted to try and a coupleof other topics I wantedto elaborate on and I madethat promise to you all,so I wanna stick to it butit wasn't quite that easybecause I accidentallybroke the LondonComfy driveso I couldn't test it further.Yeah, everything was kindof glued together in thereand I was a little aggressivewhile trying to extract those guts.And long story short,it doesn't work anymore.So I went back to thewebsite and I bought two moreat the lowest capacity, andthis was on June 22nd, 2022.20 freaking days later,I finally get a shipping notificationbut another month goesby and nothing happens.So I emailed them,LondonComfy deeply apologizedand they gave me a discount code.Yeah, Anna, I'm sure you're very sorry,if that's your real name.Nothing happens for six more weeks.So now we're in September.So I emailed them again,and to this day I stillhave not heard back.So I checked their websiteand what a surprise, they vanished.So the odds of me gettinganother LondonComfy productare slim to none but I wantedto run some more tests,so I needed to look aroundfor another drive thatwas similar but maybe stilla bit unique and different.Thankfully, I found this insane SSDon a website calledWrapango, I have no idea.The site claims a 30-terabytecapacity and read write speedsof 1050 and 1000 megabytesper second respectively.Are those speeds even possible in reality?Absolutely, thanks toan SSD's architecture,you can transfer data to and from themreally fast and they're very compact.But is that the case with this product?Let's keep looking, Inoticed the price was $89.90but thanks to many viewer submissions,I found the same product onWalmart for half the price.So that's where I bought itfrom and it arrives no problem.It did take a couple weeks though.So before we open this thing upand look at it physically,there is one big red flagI'd like to discuss, the price.As of late 2022 an eight-terabyteM.2 SSD would cost at least $1,000.So a 30-terabyte product for$40 is way beyond plausible.Heck, even the previous scammerswere charging $90 for eight terabytes.So multiply that to 30 terabytesand $40 still seems insanely low.My advice is always check theprices of similar productson other websites becauseif there's a big price gapbetween two products, that's a red flag.That usually means thecheaper product is a scamor maybe it's just atremendous pile of junk.If you can avoid websites like Walmartand Amazon when you'redoing this cross-checking,I'm not saying don'tshop on those websitesbut when you're doingyour research, be carefulwith those websites becausealmost anybody can list stuffon there, and that's exactlywhat we're dealing with today.Now, just to cover my butt here,I need to say this is nota Walmart branded product.Walmart did not make thisproduct, so cut them some slack.However, Walmart shoulddo a better job at vettingthese listings so peopledon't accidentally buy them.With that said, let's lookat the product itself.The product's design is similarto Samsung's T5 and T7 SSDs.The scammers likely didthis to trick peoplewith a nearly identical product.When I first unboxed the fake SSD,I immediately felt howlight it was comparedto a real external SSD and that tells methere's not much happeninginside this thing.But we will crack it opensoon and double check.The SSD has a blue statusLED, and a single USB-C portand it comes with a USB-C to A cable.The box advertises USB 3.1 speeds,which I highly doubt butwe will test it anyway.And it has a sticker reading \"30T\",probably meaning 30 terabytes.On the back of the boxare the system requirementsor parameters in this case.Oddly enough, it supportsAndroid, Windows,and iOS but not macOS, well, that's weird.The LondonComfy SSD worked on macOS.Don't know why this wouldn't,but we'll test that too.And the side says high speed,which I highly doubt, easy carry.Yeah, that's probably the only true thing.No time like the present.Let's plug this in and see how it works.The first real test is the capacity.I'm using a program called h2testwto assess the true capacity of this SSD.Due to the drive's slow speed and fakemassive storage capacity, the first halfof this process could take over 600 hours.Because you and me have a life,I'm not gonna subject youto the whole freaking test.So I'm gonna stop the test early atabout 300 gigabytes becausethat should be way morethan what the truecapacity of this thing is.The program wrote over 30one-gigabyte test files to the SSDand the verification processran for several hoursand the final resultswere out of 386 gigabytesscanned only 116.3gigabytes of data is usable.Let's see how that translatesto a real world situation.To further test the capacity, I erasedthe test files and transferred about180 gigabytes of video files to the SSD.Simultaneously, Windows reportedthe transfer speed of the drive.It rarely exceeded 18megabytes per second,which is nowhere near the truespeed of a USB 3.1 Gen 1 SSD,625 megabytes per second theoretically.And later in the transfer,the speed suddenly declinedto about 13 megabytes per second.That was probably the pointwhere the drive filled up.And now this cheap controllerhas to erase those old blocksof data while riding new blocks of datawhich can slow down an SSD's performance.Better controllers handle that betterbut cheaper controllers canreally slow down a drive.So that's maybe what happened.I'm open to your theories though, anyway,after the transfer, all of thefiles showed up on the drivebut only 23 of the 48 filesactually opened up properly.The rest were corrupted,and I'll explain why soon.So with these two tests,I can reasonably concludethe storage inside this drive is not30 terabytes but in fact 128 gigabytes.And for the record, I didconfirm the claim on the box.For some reason, this drivedoes not work in macOS.I tried multiple methods in Disk Utilityto format the drive and all failed.However, I used the system information appto get some additional info.The product name identifies as Disk 3.1,probably referring to theadvertised USB 3.1 speed.And the vendor ID is Integrated TechnologyExpress Incorporated witha product ID of 1234.And I love this part, thetheoretical speed of the driveis actually 480 megabits persecond, which is USB two speed,not even close to USB 3.1 gen one speed,which is five gigabits per second.So before we crack this thing open and seewhat's really on the inside, let's talkabout how this thingactually tricks the computer.The flash storage chipson an SSD's board need abrain to operate properlyand communicate with therest of the computer.This brain is a controllerwhich is generally a separateSoC or a system-on-a-chip.The controller uses afirmware so it can operate.Firmware is a type of softwarethat's programmed directly into hardware.However, this firmware canbe programmed in a misleading way.So the controller tells theOS the incorrect capacity.And earlier I transferred180 gigabytes of filesonto what's actually a 128 gigabyte drive.So 180 can't fit into 128.What happened to all of that extra data?When the first 128 gigabytes of dataare successfully transferred to the drive,the data is written to the storage mediumand the file system's fileallocation table is updatedwith the locations of this data.Much like how we read an indexto find an excerpt in a book,the computer reads the filesystem file allocation tableto find corresponding data on that drive.Now, without trulyknowing the secret sauceof the programming insideof this controller chip,I can't say with 100%certainty what happens nextbut this is likely the scenario.When you fill up a normal drive,you get a warning sayingthere's no more space.But that's not the case with this drivebecause again, it's lying to the computer.When the scammy controllerchip overfills the drive,the old bytes areoverwritten with new bytes,erasing the previous dataand making room for new data.But the old entries inthe file allocation table are untouched.So the computer and the userthink the files are therebut when the user opensthose files, they will geta data corruption error because the actualrequired data no longerexists after the overwrite.So that's how this scam productis tricking the computerand ultimately the user,and while we're here,it's a good time to remindeveryone to back up your data.Remember, two is one and one is none.So now let's cut this thingopen and see what's inside.There's no screws on thisthing like there werewith the LondonComfy drive,so we're gonna have tobust out the big guns.Oh yeah, Krazy Karl is coming back.We'll start with this handy dandy RotoZipand oh (bleep)... whatthe heck are you made of?You broke Crazy Carl's favorite tooland you'll pay for this.(ominous tone)Okay, so instead, Karl cutaround the plastic edgewith the razor blade and afew minutes later, a voila.The plastic tray slid out.Inside the tray is a singlePCB with the USB-C port,the status LED, some capacitors,the storage controller,and a single microSD card and reader.Typically SSDs havechips, usually NAND chips,soldered to the boardbut this thing just usesa microSD card probablyto keep the cost down.The controller is a Chipsbank CBM2199S.When looking this up onDevice Hunt, the vendorand device details matchexactly what we foundin the macOS systemreport, and it looks likethere's an open space on the boardso we can install Team Fortress 2.(Brassy Team Fortress 2 theme music!)But it looks like there is spaceto solder another microSD card reader.We saw this in the LondonComfy episode.So now that we havesuccessfully extracted the card,let's plug it into some...CONVERSION TECHNOLOGY!And plug it into a computerand we'll see how fastit is when it's notconnected to all of this BS.I plugged the card into myMac while booted into Windows.The system said we need toformat the disk to use itand I don't wanna do thatyet because that will erasethe card and that will screwup some tests I want to try.So for now, I hit Canceland I got an error sayingthe volume does not containa recognized file system.I tried the same thing inMacOS and got an error sayingthe disk you attached wasnot readable by the computer.For fun, I checked thecard in Disk Utilityand it confirms my theorythat this is, in fact,a 128-gigabyte microSDcard, not 30 terabytes.I wanted to see if I couldrecover those video filesI transferred earlier, so I installedProsoft's Data Rescue applicationand deep scanned the cardand the scan found 29 files.So let's recover themand see if they work.(suspenseful music)(bell chiming)Look at that. It worked.Data Rescue successfullyrecovered 29 movie files.The file names were wiped outbut other metadata was still intact.So with that test complete,it's now safe to format this cardand we'll see how fastit is, back in Windows,I clicked the Format button andboom, it worked immediately.To test the speed Iinstalled CrystalDiskMark.Complete with Otaku themes!and the write speed clocked in at78 megabytes per second withan 87 megabyte per second read.In addition, I transferredseveral of those video filesagain and the speed was about60 megabytes per second.Man, this is just sad, thecard by itself directly pluggedinto a computer performsover three times fasterthan when it's insideof this BS enclosure.So Walmart, I think you needto take this off your websitebut I know a companythat actually gives youthe real storage and speedthat you order, Linode.If you have an application or websitethat you need to scaleand deploy, Linode hasthe infrastructure andthe 24/7 support you need.Linode offers out-of-box appsfor game servers like TF2,CS Go, and even Minecraft.You can run your ownvirtual private networkwith open VPN, build an online applicationwith Joomla's contentmanagement system or builda video streaming site witha multitude of app choices.There's so much you can do with Linode'saffordable Linux virtualmachines and to boot,they offer award-winning24/7 technical support.To put it simply, if it runson Linux, it runs on Linode.Visit linode.com/computerclanand click oneof the signup buttons and we'll give youa 60 day $100 credit justfor watching this episode.And when you do that,you're also supporting the Computer Clan.So thank you very much.So be wary of these fake SSDsand be wary of thosefake flash drives too.Don't forget about those.And man, I thought fakeflash drives were bad enough.What's next? Fake flashlights?Oh, you gotta be kidding me.(upbeat music)- Ken, did youfinish your homework yet?- No, mom, a cheap SSD ate my homework.\n"