We at c’t have been drawing attention to counterfeit USB flash drives for 20 years, but there are still plenty of counterfeits on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and many other online stores. And their vendors are bold: they invent fancy hardware with impossible memory sizes and sell it at ridiculous prices. And when connected to PC, said USB stick actually shows 10TB or more, even though only a fraction is available. The perfidy: everything still seems to be in order when transferring data. Only when you urgently need the backup stored on it or the photo collection, the fraud is exposed and the data is gone forever.
The weekly c’t podcast c’t uplink is available…
Among other things, USB sticks, portable SSDs and MicroSD cards are affected. My colleague Christof Windeck ordered some to test for fakes. Some of the builds are downright ridiculous: there’s a circuit board with a MicroSD card inserted into the SSD case, or the manufacturer just wrote the fake storage size on the hardware with a marker pen.
At c’t uplink, we talk about the best way to recognize such hardware before you buy it or how to reliably check it on your own computer afterwards. Storage expert c’t Lutz Labs has also tested some devices and portable SSDs with 1TB, which actually record a lot of data.
Also present: Achim Barczok, Lutz Labs, Christof Windeck
the c 16/2022 is available at the newsstand, im browsers and in the c’t app for iOS and Android.
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