Often on the street we encounter street vendors selling USB drives (flash memory, SD cards, micro SD…), who loudly announce their irresistible offers of high-capacity flash drives at low prices . You approach, see the products, and their palpable visual quality (is there such a word?) seems trustworthy.
However, the fly in the ointment comes out when you are about to fill the pendrive and unexpectedly you notice that the real capacity was not the one that appears on the box, but a few Gigs, not even close to half of what was promised: S
The height of bad luck is that in some cases you cannot copy more than 1 GB, it returns an error and you find yourself unable to delete the copied files. Pfff a scam of those that are ashamed to tell them ...
How to prevent scams? By buying from local stores, but if you've already bought one online or perhaps on the street and want to know if your USB drive is fake , run a test on it, that is, check its status.
Checking a fake USB stick
1. First, download H2testw, a free tool for checking the integrity of storage disks. It's portable, lightweight, and requires no installation, so just unzip and run it.
2. Change your language to English (so you don't have to deal with German) and with the “Select target” button, you locate the unit of your device.
3. Click on Write + Verify to start the verification.
The processing time will depend on the capacity of the USB drive; at the end of the test, if everything went well, you will see the message: Test finished without errors.
That means that your device will not give you headaches, otherwise, if your USB memory turns out to be false, the message will be different as seen in the following screenshot:
The first three lines indicate the following:
The media is likely to be defective.
6.7 GByte OK (14246936 sectors)
55.5 GByte DATA LOST (116567016 sectors)
What translated would be:
The device appears to be faulty
Actual capacity is 6.7GB
55.5 GB lost
Very easy and useful, right? This post contains more detailed information from its author with this example cited.
– Related article | Programs that should never be missing from your USB
And you, have you ever bought a fake pendrive? share your experience with us.