I recently bought (semi-knowingly) a fake Kingston Datatraveller 64GB 150 off eBay for just £17.50, at that price I knew it was too good to be true as these retail at well over £99.99 + in the UK.
Although the drive does not hold data properly or work as it should because it is fake. The packaging was very convincing, although on the back there was some spelling errors. It is only when you hold it in your hands it feels cheap, the PCB rattled inside the plastic case and the top cap was easily broke, it is very easy to split open the USB stick away from the case.I am always wary of buying from sellers in China, thats why I knew the item was fake as anyone thats bought off eBay for a long time will tell you that anything from China which has a well known brandname and cheap is usually a fake, I have bought lots of items from China in the past and have seen fake Sony mice, fake branded webcams, webcams that are supposedly HD but are not, poor build quality etc... the list goes on. I was fortunately refunded by PayPal so I didn't lose any money.
However you can test if your USB drive is fake or not by running a cool utitity called H2testW. H2testw 1.4 has proven itself to be the best of breed for detecting counterfeit Flash drives. It is extremely easy to use and provides detailed information. Created by Harald Bögeholz, the interface is in German but has the option to run in English. It is free and standalone. Nothing is installed onto the operating system. Designed for Windows it can run under Linux if Wine is installed. It will not run under the Mac O/S.
Fake drives usually tell you you have a 64GB drive, Windows will read it as a 64GB drive but the actual size is usually only 4GB or so this is why you get data transfer errors, even though Windows might seem to be reporting the correct capacity of the drive that information might not be sufficiently enough to prove that it is truly a 64GB flash drive. This is where H2testw helps a lot of eBayers to PROVE they have received a fake from a seller.
Sample Output For A Fake 64 GB Drive
The media is likely to be defective.
3.8 GByte OK (8084847 sectors)
58.6 GByte DATA LOST (122921617 sectors)
Details:710.5 KByte overwritten (1421 sectors)
7.6 MByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 15630 sectors)
58.6 byte corrupted (122904566 sectors)
710.5 KByte aliased memory (1421 sectors)
First error at offset: 0×000000003cef8470
Expected: 0xeb7ac43a237c5170
Found: 0xeb7a843a237c5170
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 9.24 MByte/s
Reading speed: 10.8 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
This is 4GB USB flash drive not a 64GB USB flash drive. It is of poor quality. As 4GB drive it should be about 3.9 GB not 3.8 GB formatted. This indicates in low level formatting a lot of bad sectors had to be locked out. Usually flash chips like these are rejected for major brands and should be destroyed. Unfortunately instead of the furnace flames these chips are leaving the back door of factories to be resold. These chips are a favorite for counterfeiter's to reprogramme. Low cost, big profit.
If like me you were thinking you will receive a working 64GB drive, then you are wrong! I did know before buying that I could claim for a refund if it was fake through PayPal so I took a risk. The moral of this story is the age old saying "If its too good to be true, then it is too good to be true!".
Please checkout my guide on fixing and restoring a fake flash drive back to it's original capacity.
More information about fake flash drives can be found here: http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/
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