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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column Too cheap to be true? I n last month’s column I suggested replacing the ‘old-fashioned’ mechanical spinner HDD (hard disk drive) in a computer with a ‘new-fashioned’ SSD (solidstate drive), as a relatively simple way to radically improve overall performance. I added a few caveats, notably the warning that scammers are using online sales sites to offer fake high-capacity (mainly 1TB) SSDs at surprisingly low prices. Now is the time to flesh out this warning. Scam drives The fake capacity scam follows on from the scam sale, which began several years ago, of phoney USB memory sticks and portable USB HDDs. Fortunately, there are some easy, and free, ways to spot the phonies. Hard technical and historical facts are tough to tie down, but it seems that one or more clever factories in China have created a memory controller chip that gives a false reading for the memory cells it is controlling. The controller tells a computer that the memory capacity is 1TB when the actual memory chips can only store around one tenth of that. The controller also fools the ordinary formatting process. So, plugging suspect memory into a computer and even fully formatting the memory fakes the 1TB capacity. In use, data appears to write to the memory as intended. But once the amount of data exceeds the real memory capacity, new data simply over-writes what was previous written or disappears into a black hole. Over recent years I have been sold fake capacity USB sticks, portable HDDs and now SSDs. I was lucky. I know enough about IT to check, return to the seller and get a full refund. Many people, especially IT innocents looking for a bargain, will probably never know the drives they bought have not been storing all the data they appeared to be storing. By the time they find out that some of their stored data has been lost, all hope of claiming a refund will be long gone. The seller will probably be long gone, too. Very likely some sellers do not even know they are selling fakes because they do not have the IT savvy to check what their supplier has supplied. Most customers will not discover the problem until they find they cannot access data stored months or years earlier. They may well then assume the data loss is due to user error, media ageing or accidental erasure. Because many online sellers all sell basically the same products, albeit dressed up in different cosmetic packaging, and sometimes with counterfeited trusted names, the golden rule is to check real capacity immediately after purchase and before storing any data. Experience suggests that once someone who is knowingly, or unknowFull formatting of an SSD can take ing, selling fake drives the best part of a day. Practical Electronics | December | 2023 is confronted with a fact-based refund claim, they will not want to risk a dispute that exposes the scam. But… how do you check if even full formatting will not expose the scam? Is it a fake? Fortunately, there are several capacity test apps available for free download. Take your pick from a web search but I opted for, and am recommending to others, the simple MediaTester. This is available as a standalone .exe file (no installation needed) from the Windows Online Store (which is in itself a good indication of safety), and also from Github: https://bit.ly/pe-dec23-msmt https://bit.ly/pe-dec23-ghmt Software author Doug Krahmer says: ‘Fake media sales have reached epidemic proportions. Fake media is being falsely labeled with popular brand names including SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, Kingston, and others. Not only are these counterfeit, but they often contain less storage than the cards report to the computer. A 128GB SD card may actually contain only 8GB or 4GB of actual space. After filling up all of the real space, the card will respond as if it is storing the data but it is actually throwing it away. The files will look like they exist but they are actually full of null bytes or completely corrupted. If you try to read the data you will find that it is ALL GONE.’ The screen grabs show a few readouts from MediaTester, captured while checking a range of SSDs. Most (bought from Amazon) passed the test because I paid a fair price for the capacity offered.; £17 for 256GB and £37 Bliksem test moved on to reading and verifying. 15 (Left) MediaTester reports that a 256GB SSD, bought to use as the cache in a NAS, has passed the test. (Above) MediaTester reports that a 1TB SSD quickly failed the test, even though it had been fully formatted, apparently, correctly. So I asked for and got a refund. A fair low-priced 1TB SSD labelled Bliksem went through the day-long process of writing, reading and verifying – and Passed of cloning the OS direct to the SSD from the HDD, making an image copy of the old HDD OS on an intermediary HDD and then restoring from this to the new SSD. Yet another scam for 1TB. The failure SSD was suspiciously cheap; 1TB for £18 from eBay. But it would obviously be dangerous to assume that just because an asking price is high, the product is legitimate. The seller may just be marking it up as a disguise. Take your time Be warned that fully checking an SSD can be very slow. A 1TB drive can take a day. One advantage of using MediaTester is that it runs a simple check before a full check, so phoney SSDs may fail after an hour or so, making a full check unnecessary. If an SSD fails, make a screen capture of the fail note and append this to any claim for a refund. That way the claim is more likely to sail through. The eBay seller refunded my £18 with no quibbles. But with bare-faced cheek he asked me not to leave ‘non-positive feedback’. Of course, I did, to warn others: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115852033293 ‘The real capacity of this SSD was only around one tenth the 1TB claimed, as shown by routine Properties checks and formatting. I immediately asked for a refund and was immediately promised a refund. Similar cheap SSDs are widely on sale. I strongly suggest that anyone with one urgently checks it with the test software (such as the free MediaTest mentioned above). Although the SSD may appear to be storing data it may silently overwrite once the real capacity is exceeded.’ The fake I bought and returned is now listed as ‘Out of Stock’. OS cloning note As a footnote tip, learned from successfully upgrading a Lenovo PC by replacing its HDD spinner with an SSD, Cloning the OS (operating system) direct from HDD to SSD may expose an annoying action by Windows; the PC may insist on assigning the SSD more than one Drive letter (eg, C: for the Windows OS and E: for the Windows Rescue partition). This problem may be solved by, instead 16 Talking of clever scams, exploitation of a loophole in the lost password option offered by mobile (cell phone) networks, is escalating. One of my SIMs is O2 Pay as You Go, and I now get at least one call a week from scammers with foreign accents claiming to be from O2, and offering me a better deal on ‘my contract’. The fact that I have no contract immediately flags the call as a scam, but others who do have contracts may well be suckered – especially because many companies now out-source their sales and support to Asia. Sometimes I play along to confirm that the network has still not been able to plug the security loophole. Briefly, here’s how the scam works. The caller picks a mobile number at random or from harvested lists and hopes that (as in my case) it is still linked to the network that originally allocated the number. After some flannel talk about service and deals on offer, the scammer says he/she will send a 6-digit security code to prove they are really from O2. The caller also says to ignore the security warning text which precedes the code. It’s like the EULAs we never read. Unbeknownst to the phone-owner the scammer has gone on line to the network website, while flannelling, and uses the called number to exploit the network’s Lost Password/Password Reset facility. This is what sends the owner a security code. If the phone-owner falls for the trick and reads the code to the scammer, the scammer can immediately re-set the password, thereby locking out the rightful owner, and wreaking havoc, for instance using stored financial details to buy credit or order a new phone, and steal anything else available. If I have a little time to spare, I sometimes waste the scammer’s time by reading out wrong six-digit codes; I also ask for the address where they are working. The last time this happened the scammer told he was at O2’s HQ at ‘Batherd, Slog, Birkshire’. He was of course reading Bath Rd, Slough, Berkshire from his scam script! Practical Electronics | December | 2023