I recently went with my friend to buy USB Pen Drives as I had heard that 32GB kingston pendrives were being sold for Rs 500/- .Of course I knew that no company would be selling pendrives at such price,so It was obvious that it was some cheap Chinese product, but being curious,I still went ahead and bought one. Who knows it may work… Before Buying the Pendrive I asked the dealer what was its warrantee,he was reluctant to give any although there is a 1-3 year warranty on pendrives .I asked him to confirm properties of the pendrive in windows.He allowed me to do so and it displayed absolute 31.2 GB intact. Then I got curious that how it could be possible? Nevertheless,I purchased the pendrive..
After reaching home when I tried to copy the 4 GB “The Dark Knight” movie,and it got corrupted..that made me thinking again..I Googled and found similar cases arising through eBay. The company website didn't even had the model I purchased listed.I was selectively fooled and then I started experimenting with the pendrive..
Here is what I found -
- On copying pictures and stuff I found out that only till 2GB of data was intact, the rest got corrupted.
- No firmware signature was there..
- Formatting the Pendrive was of no use.
- I tried using windows Disk Check utility to see whether the bad sectors could be recovered but the program used to hang on initiating it.
- The fake took an excessively long time (1 to 10 hours) only 'pretending' writing but the data was not actually being written.
- Several Hidden system folders with random names having files more that 2.5 GB of size appeared randomly eg. 00000.000 will appear and you cannot delete them.
- On opening the pendrive I saw the PCB was in a pretty bad condition,It had a 2GB RAM chip and was patched in firmware to make it look as it was of 32 GB.
I used several programs to find out the actual capacity of pendrive and to format it.
(experiment with them :D )
EPILOGUE
The pendrive was dumped into trash after its dissection because it was thoroughly useless.ULTRA Slow transfer speeds,data corruption and random files..It deserved that.
I can say only one thing in the end..BE ORIGINAL, BUY ORIGINAL..
