*It's an obvious scam but people may still fall for it if they aren't too careful. Just be careful when buying stuff like this* Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment in my iWish series! I said I wouldn't. I know, but I bought this as a pure curiousity, simply because it uses SATA instead of USB. Hope this was still entertaining for the first video of 2024 (Happy New Year also everyone!) and thank you to the folks that did donate towards seeing this and other products on the channel. I appreciate you all so much :) Let me know what you thought of this one down below! TIMESTAMPS: Introduction & Disclaimers: 0:00 The Listing, Pricing & Comparison: 1:44 Unboxing: 3:56 The 4TB Drive & Taking it apart: 4:58 Plugging it into a PC & First Issues: 6:17 Testing with H2TestW, More Issues etc: 7:24 Further Analysis of the Board: 8:40 HD Sentinel, AS SSD Benchmark, Second Test & Results: 9:50 Final Thoughts, Be Cautious & Rambling: 10:57 Thanking folks & Outro: 12:27 Be good people!
I had to service a computer that was acting up. It had a drive very similar to this in it. The client had bought one and installed it as their boot drive. After getting windows installed, Steam, and a few games, it crashed exactly like that. People have fallen for it, and I'm just glad this client hadn't had enough time to put a lot of their life on it.
It's just hard to tell anymore and obvious to one person, may not be obvious to me, so I truly appreciate you taking the time for stuff like this! I'm still in the dark sometimes about what is good VS scam products and I really love trying to keep up with the good, bad, and ugly of computers, electronics, etc.... but it is HARD!!!
Thing is it's not that obvious to everyone. I've thanked you in another post for the heads up on this, I know I'm going to have to warn people of it and I doubt I'll be the only person who's seen this video and will be warning others. Good work mate, every time you point out what you might think is obvious, someone who doesn't think it's obvious finds out the easy way rather than the hard way, even if it's at 2 or 3 degrees of separation.
@@mitabpraga7487 Yeah, that's the problem. If you don't look closely at it, you won't spot it. I didn't see it myself until I pulled it from the system and looked closer. It's just close enough that it'll pass a cursory inspection.
A few years back when a drive like this was $65 I found a 512GB Lexar SSD on Amazon for $35 shipped. I thought it was too good to be true but it was Amazon so I knew i'd get my money back and went for it. Turns out it was 100% legit and someone was dropping stock in a liquidation sale. I should have bought 10 of them. You win some. You lose some. I still use that drive to this very day as a test drive for PCs I assemble. And it still runs like a champ.
Oh wow that's actually a crazy story. You really got a bargain with this one and it encourages me to possibly try and get a drive using this method. However, I would only recommend to those who actually know how to test these drives and wouldn't put anything important on them even if they show up okay
@@RMED24it's always fun to do these things, but I like to keep in mind that it's more about the hobby than it is getting a good value. After all, the time spent making sure a drive is legit and works well could be spent on more profitable endeavors, and then you can use that extra money to buy reliable, warrantied drives!
Meanwhile I tried a 2 TB SSD some days ago on Amazon, normal price - and it was a scam. Amazon is just crap they simply don't push out companies that scam...
Yeah, I'm divided on those. On one hand you got a drive that works at a price appropriate for the size, on the other hand you still gave the scammer money. Of course unless you got your money back. Seen that with faked graphics cards. Flash them back to what they actually are, make a claim to get the money back, enjoy a free low-end backup card.
These obviously scam tech items are a guilty pleasure to watch. We all know its bullshit but seeing the stuff these scammers do to make it seem legit is so interesting
A couple of years ago, I fell for this basic scam on a 1TB drive from an ebay seller. In my case, the usable capacity was something just north of 64GB. I ended up finding a flashing tool on a Russian site that let me flash it to be a 64GB drive. I only use it for light duty, but it seems to operate with no issues.
I would try to make a 96 GB partition and try the H2TestW again (multiple times) - either it will work, or not, depends on where the capacity was faked and how resilient is the wear levelling. If it will work, it should just report lot of damaged cells (above capacity), as long as the untrimmed space stays smaller than the total NAND capacity.
Beware even if this drive could be flashed back to its true capacity the chips used for storage are often old ones ripped from used drives. So they would soon fail anyhow. The scammers are also doing this with drives that are actually the rated capacity (ie a 4 TB that is 4 TB) but often have multiple makes/models of heavily used chips on a single board. Certainly wouldn't trust any data to them!
It's the same as some scam companies selling old hard drives as new by wiping the SMART data and re-labelling (SONNICS is a company on eBay that do this). They look perfectly new until you hit errors.
When I first saw this I thought "for that price you can get a real 1TB SSD", and then after he showed the price of the real one, I double checked and WOW have the prices gone up, nearly double on the low end in just a couple months.
Could this be defective device 'recycling'? Because why would they do any extra effort for a scam product? It realistically won't take long for a buyer of a 4 TB drive to realize it's rotten. They could just as well shipped a case with no PCB in it. And why remove the controller labeling? Some kind of serial number traceability?
Serial no but there's a batch identification on ICs indeed - week and year code, facility code and some top secret rolling codes. If you have one device, you might not know exactly but if you have a few dozen, the IC manufacturer and counterfeit experts can trace them.
Hoofddorp is next to the Amsterdam airport where many giant companies have shell offices inside of The Netherlands for low tax reasons. This address points to one of these random office building with tons of international businesses that only collect mail from there and nobody is working.
Interesting. Are these ever recoverable? Like, being able to make them work in their original capacity at least? Not that it would be desirable, but just as an exercise.
@@moth.monster No, it doesn't work, since the full flash capacity is still aliased several times, so when flash controller writes to one flash location, it actually pops up in a bunch of repeat locations. The full drive capacity will be used for wear levelling. You really need to reprogram it for actual flash capacity.
it is weird how 8 months ago, i bought the 4tb ssd... yes, sata not m.2(though, they were literally same priced at the time for same capacity) on amazon for 180 british pounds. how exactly did it go up in price? i went for 870 evo. almost half a year later for old tech, i'm expected to pay 220 or about 20% more? for aging tech? samsung ssd's suck a nut... 4tb samsung sata ssd equaled to 3.27tb on windows, before the OP.
It should go down in price, with the advance of technology. I brought brands like goldenfir, kingspec with 940GB in aliexpress for less than $50, filled them with my files and working fine for now.
I am sure they are just re-selling very old ssd that are 128gb that are like maybe 10$ or so and making some money back, nothing new really. At least its really ssd ahahaa
First time viewing one of your videos. Time stamps etc. made it fun to watch. Imo the bright yellow/blue text in your video thumbnails are hurting your views. Maybe 10 years ago they wouldn't be mistaken for spam/AI content but nowadays I think people tend to stay away from those.
Similar scam has been going on with LTO tapes. You can buy a 15TB tape and it only has 6TB capacity!!! How can they get away with that. Aliexpress sellers should add "4TB compressed" with very small letters, maybe.
Give or take, do or die, there are time you gotta give things a go and remember which brands can work for you. Back then I used to trust Seagate for hard drives, then Western Digital. Basically things can change. Getting a 4TB SSD for $40 is obviously the one I should really avoid. If I can get a decent quality at a very good deal then yes I can go for as long as I am aware of detailed yet simple specifications.
SATA? that's from dinosaur era man... lol! i was in middle school "Elementary"....it's good that it was brought up. Do you have any of those "FLOPPY DISK"? lol!
Those laser scrubbed markings are such a Chinese classic, always the same. The funniest is that they do it with any form of scam, including IP theft products they clone out of good products, so that other's won't reverse engineer their own clones. So yes, they steal, but don't want you stealing back. THAT'S wrong!
I'm from the Netherlands and yes Hoofddorp exists. Western Digital Netherlands B.V. stationed in Hoofddorp. But the adress isn't right, that's a empty building as far as I know.. LoL
Is it worth the trouble of filing formal complaints with authorities that govern the sale of such products? If these scammers are allowed to resell junk as something way under the advertised capacity, that would be fraud. Misrepresentation of product capacity could land them in a lot of trouble, if only someone were willing to do all of the legal work required to shut down these scammers and make it prohibitively expensive to falsely advertise the size of the drive they're ripping people off with.
just a cheap ssd rehoused in new caseing. The thing about chinese knock offs is they have access to real packageing and stickers a lot of the time! Its getting easier for them to do this shit,companies need to tighten up and secure their ip at the production sites
Only somewhat related to this, but I just ordered an 256 GB M2 from AliExpress, just to see if I wil actually get anything for 10€ or whatever will arrive at my door lol
Fun thing is about this SSD is that there are actual 128GB ones made by real companies that are $20 USD (I checked and this guy's $26) and there's a few for $8 more that are 256GB, so it's a ripoff even if they were genuine about their product.
Is it bad i bought a couple of these knowing they were shit but still better then a disk drive for my PC that's only job is to show movies on my TV? I bought a couple of them knowing they had to be a scam but the system I planned to put them in was just for crime, and VLC nothing else. That system has now been running non stop for about 3 years and still is running fine.
These scam drives don't hold onto data, since the whole non-existent drive capacity will be used for wear levelling, overwriting the data with garbage. You can buy actual sort-of reputable third tier Chinese brands, or say Silicon Power from Taiwan or various cheap reseller brands (Intenso etc) which are actually exactly what they claim to be. Not exciting or great drives, predictably low-spec, but not faulty out of the box like this. So i don't think you bought ones exactly like these.
I would be doubtful finding a 4 TB HDD for that price, not to mention SSDs. Now if there is a 480 or 512 GB SSD inside and the performance is decent, I wouldn't even mind, but they should still declare it properly. And there is still demand for smaller drives. I can find a bunch of SSDs in the 480/500/512 GB (TLC and QLC mixed) range for 40€ and 4 TB QLC SSDs for as low as 155€ and 4 TB TLC SSDs at 195 € And that scam drive doesn't seem to have any SLC or DRAM cache. Just a controller and a pair of NAND chips. Unless the controller has cache integrated.
Another version of scam i've seen is that they put cheap micro SSDs inside and the result is pretty much the same as this one it works but the capacity and speeds they advertise is nowhere close you buy 1 TB or more and get a 32 or 64 gb micro ssd if you're lucky.
A lot of scammers on Aliexpress. And Aliexpress doesn't do anything about it, and they almost never refund, because mostly they want you to send it back to seller and the price is like 100 times the cost of the item.
Yeah I used to think ali was decent at giving refunds but a while back a claim was rejected with the reason as 'logistics'. Yeah just one word that means nothing. So I bought something else that cost about 3X more and said it didn't arrive. Now I have credit in my 'refund' account to allow for future scams hehe! That's the only true way to get a no-questions-asked refund. Just say it didn't arrive and there's nothing they can do as long as they didn't track it ;-)
@@g4z-kb7ct I even have had that sellers came up with fake tracking numbers and aliexpress would say that I had to "check with local shipping company". I don't understand they can get away with this. As for europe they have to comply with European rules. This time I am scammed for 350 USD. The only times I get a full refund is with cheap stuff that costs a few dollars. If it's more expensive they never refund anything.
you get a refund on this scam ? its allways good to ask for a refund and do a bank chargeback / start paypal ticket for a refund. the more refunds scammers are forced to pay the less profitable scamming is. everyone hitting scammers in the pocket is the only way to stop them.
Its funny cause i dont think they need to lie about the size or do any trickery with firmware if the listing was honest i would totally buy these for my older computers like amd 4200 and p4 or ide interfaced ones for my oldest computers. I dont suport the lies though so id buy from a different brand
I bought 5 of these to play with. The chipset isn't a Realtek, but a Raymax chip using an unlicensed copy of the Realtek Chip. I found exactly the same result with mine, except when I used the tool to properly reconfigure my "2TB" drives to their correct 100GB, the drives actually performed very close to their 500Mb/sec advertised speeds. If I had the tools to remove and re-solder flash chips, I'd make 2 x 240GB drives out of my 4 120GB drives. ^_^
I bought a 4TB M.3 SSD a few days ago. It arrived and it's showing almost 4TB. Should I be worried? Edit: Everything is bare and exposed, no case, so nothing to hide?
Those copyists are really clever. They overwrite the BIOS flash chip, so the product can pretend to be 4 TByte of size. The operating system reads out just this Information. It's necessary to use a test software which makes real writings with patterns and read those patterns back. Then you will get big eyes!
So looks like you bought a $40 drive enclosure LOL A lot of Aliexpress (and ebay for that matter) generally have disclaimers at the end (no matter what it is) and will state something irrelevant like "Products shot with different light sources can affect storage capacities" 😂🤣
ah yes the good ol' scams by aliexpress, well there was an attempt at least. still i saw some crucial ssd prices (i want to upgrade my notebook with 1TB at some point) and man, they got a little more expensive compared to the one i bought i think 8/9 years ago. yeah 2023 passed really fast honestly, and i think this year will be the same shitty fast crap as well :)
WHY PAY $44 FOR A 120GB when you can get genuine 256GB's for that half that price off of amazon. i've bought a good 500 of the 128's and 256's for under $25 and have only had a handful die
Well , for the money it is still NOT a good deal. Because some very simple minded viewers would say " but at least is 120gigs SSD for $40! " #1 faulty nand firmware that need to be updated that only God knows how. #2 at $40 you can have a legit branded 500 gigs SSD with warranty. #3 you will never solder the 2 remaining chips at the back to make it a 240 gigs so stop dreaming. Calculating the time labor and tools you need to make it happen you could buy a 2Tera SSD directly.
Really a fake SSD costs more than a genuine one. As I bought a Crucial 500GB SSD recently and that was around £50 and obviously gives me 500GB (unformatted of course) and this fake is $40 plus and only 111 GB, and its useless after that.
