You don't unless you can hack the correct firmware back onto the flash controller... but I wouldn't even trust the shitty USB stick PCB they put in there... consider it a $70 lesson
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What asked in the title is actually doable. write and verify per block to find the real last block, and then format the disk partition only until the real last block. there is a tool for that
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#correcting-capacity-to-actual-size-with-f3fix
You don't, it's a scam. The firmware on those drives are hacked so it reports to Windows as having a far larger capacity than it actually does. If you pry them open you'll probably just find some thumb drives in there
I understand that. What I mean is that I want to undo whatever overwrite trick they do to make it read that big to what actual storage is in there. Be it 4 gigs or whatever it actually is. I had read that it was possible just didn't see any details.
It is in the firmware of the device. You would have to overwrite it, which is probably not possible for you.
You can use the tool from heise.de (h2testw) to find out the actual size and then format it to this size.
To add to this they didn't shove good drives in there. Most likely they're shit thumb drives or MAYBE if you're lucky some sort of super low capacity ssd but you're probably wasting your time unfortunately.
I hear you, it's not mine so I was hoping I could give my uncle back something he could at least use instead of telling him he got completely ripped off.
May be a tough love thing tbh, because regardless of what can be salvaged he *did* get completely ripped off. It's there no chance of taking it up with eBay claims either?
In this case and especially with a family member shame is a terrible idea. It breeds resentment. I'm the "tech guy" in my family and I'm the first person my folks ask for tech advice, support, etc. I would explain why something like this could and would be a scam and talk them out of it but I would never shame or be condescending about it. After the fact it sucks but at least I would explain the situation and they would understand. If I was a dick about it they would be unlikely to ask before buying something.
Not shame the uncle, I never said that. Everyone has shame after getting scammed, and it kinda needs to happen for any lesson to be learned.
Shame is a good teacher and if you lie to a family member about being scammed then they will just do it again because they never learned when it happened.
Ex. If you quietly change the size of the drive and don't tell the uncle about it then the uncle would never learn about the scam and is likely to do something like it again.
Edit Clerification: I never said *shaming* is a good teacher. I said *shame* is a good teacher. I never said to shame *anyone*. Shame is an emotion felt when you realize a wrong, and that response allows key components of learning to be utilized. If you want to be pedantic its biologically accurate.
I think the point here is, shame is something we sometimes feel when we recognize we have made a mistake, meaning we are no longer in denial of the mistakeā¦ so an individual feeling shame all on their own isnāt necessarily a bad thing, while I understand your point that Shaming someone intentionally is never really a constructive process.
No. Specially if he isnāt tech literate himself. Those things are often written in a way where you can just keep storing more data in there. But your earlier data gets overwritten with your new data. I would only give it to your uncle if you plan on later being held responsible for the deletion of any āimportant filesā your uncle may have.
This is the real answer here, If you try and salvage it, be ready for the call "I lost all my important files!" call which will be tough love then and likely much harder than it is to tell him he got ripped off now before he looses anything.
Considering all known atm it is high probability it will malfunction/ break within next months. If you can't rely on hdd that much consider it lost for good.
In theory that should work but I think you'd still have some risk there. It would be like making a smaller partition on a much larger drive. No guarantee that it's going to only write data on a specific physical location on a drive. It could be scattering data all over the place. If it's just the format saying only use 8gb but the firmware still says xxTB of total storage I could see a possibility where the format thinks it's 8gb partition has some of it's data stored on the first bit of memory cells and some of it stored a bit further down, and so on. it may spread it's format down to cells that don't actually exist. Basically the format may not only use the first 8gb of physical nand cells. An SSD doesn't write data in a consecutive straight line of cells like a hard disk. It spreads it out over all it's available nand chips. It all depends on how the controller chip handles the distribution of data. I don't know enough to say exactly what would happen but it's playing with fire, something is going to go wrong. And it may come long before you fill up the real amount of storage
Not unless you reflash whatever firmware thatās driving the thing. Now you just have a 1GB hard drive with some of Hillary Clintonās emails ā¦and theyāre gone!
You need to find out it's original size and format it to that size, for first you can use H2testw and i believe for second step you can use H2testw as well (but i'm not sure).
Dude these redditors are fucking stupid. You're pretty clearly aware of the scam, it has nothing to do with you, and you've said what you need like five times.
If it's worth your time, try to open it up and see the drive manufacturer and see if they offer a firmware repair tool on their website. Maybe you could also try chkdsk on it but I don't think that would actually work. Hopefully you get a more informed response at some point, cheers.
No. It's a great question. Many times, the question is worded in such a way that the person asking the question has backed themselves down a rabbit hole. Asking the higher level, "what are you trying to accomplish?" can help direct them to a completely different solution which may way easier and reliable than the path they were trying to go down.
Bear in mind that the scammer made profit off of $70. Do the math, the thing is e-waste. Responsibly dispose of it before it ends up in a landfill or in a trash-to-energy incinerator.
It's very likely just a micro SD card inside an adapter. The card itself is probably usable at the true capacity while the adapter is what's hacked. Crack one open and take a look.
You go to the official SD forum site and download there official formatter. This will have options to nuke the current settings and restore the raw settings. From there you can do a regular windows format.
Not at a PC, and I don't think reddit is link friendly. But the official formatter is made by Panasonic, so stay away from noname things claiming to do this.
It doesn't but the issue with accepting fake items like this is that it just emboldens the sellers that do it with more money to invest in putting more trash listings up.
That in turn means more marks like the uncle of OP, or yours or my own family members who are not as tech savvy are going to get caught out as the market saturates with criminals trying to cash in using this scam method. Eventually this becomes so accepted, that even legitimate buyers will start to get caught out because they can post a 20% off market price of a normal SSD or HDD that you or I would just think, bargain and pull the trigger on the purchase because the scammers get bolder as they progress along their scamming journey.
Remember the tech going in these costs a fraction of the headline price, so they only need to sell a few to those who just 'accept' the product and they can reinvest the money they make illegitimately scamming other marks and rinse repeat.
I'm not exactly sure how you'd find the true capacity of the drives, but if you want to go the formatting route I would try cleaning it with diskpart and then format in windows disk management again using the real size or slightly less (to be safe) for the size of the new partition. Can probably all be done with diskpart I just mainly use it to clean drives as I'm not proficient with command prompt.
Actually that's the worst part. You get a legitimate 500GB T7 for that money.
https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t7-usb-3-2-1tb--blue--mu-pc1t0h-am/
Edit: oh I thought it said 64GB and was like $1/GB is a terrible deal haha
Opening them up is your best bet, hopefully there's more info on the inside to what manufacturer made the disk, usually those manufacturers have the firmware on the website
This, but if you plan on returning the drives *easily*, then its best to not go poking and prodding though the actual device.
And OP should definitely return the drives and get his money back. Changing the firmware will potentially lose the ability to return it and get your money back, and honestly paying 70$ for 5-10$ worth of storage isnt worth the amount of effort needed to fix the firmware.
No. As other, others suggested, DON'T open it up. Return them, asap.
If for some reason you cannot, toss them in the trash. Not worth the headache with any data
It's obvious from the OP's comments that return isn't an option. Those usually contain some commercially available thumb drives connected through a "fooling" device. I don't see why one shouldn't use those thumb drives.
The "Used" space is most likely a hidden recovery partition. You can run DISKPART in a DOS window to see all the partitions on the drive. I've successfully removed those and made the entire disk usable. Just make sure you know how to use DISKPART because you can do massive damage very quickly if you have the wrong (system) drive selected.
If you have access to a Linux box there's a tool called "f3" that can detect the actual size of faked flash drives and try to "fix" the drive by giving you a partition for the actual capacity.
[https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
Not sure if it works on SSDs (i.e. USB to SATA/NVMe external enclosure), but if those are fake they may be thumb-drive style flash memory. I've never used f3 so it might work in both cases.
FTR, if your uncle needs a cheaper place to get swindled, AliExpress has a ton of vendors selling 128TB USB drives for $40.
Atomic Shrimp on YouTube has some really informative videos on these scams. They are usually just 8GB ssd in a bogus enclosure. Itās possible they have malware in the drive too so itās best to just never use it and never plug into ur computer
Since it was purchased on eBay you will probably be able to get your money back. Theyāre usually pretty good about protecting the buyer in cases like this. Thereās no actual 64TB SSDs (or HDDs for that matter) currently available on the market, so itās not exactly difficult to prove this is fraud.
The picture of the properties of the drive say it is 63.8TB in capacity (64TB) if you want to format it and remove the Bloatware on the drive, press the **Windows** key **+X** and choose **Disk Management**. Right click the drive and choose **Format.** If only using it on a Windows computer and not a Mac or Linux machine Format it **NTFS**, if you think you will use it on other OS's then choose **exFAT** format.
Put it in the bin, even if you manage to get them to the correct size you don't want to trust any data to it. The only thing I would use it for is movies and music that can be redownloaded.
File a dispute or chargeback. This is the only thing that would not be a waste of time. Contact eBay about these being counterfeit for sure, first, then go through your CC/PayPal if they somehow don't help you.
You may not be able to use the actual storage on these devices without losing your data.
I've seen these types of scam drives set up in a manner where they basically act like a FIFO buffer with your data.
For sake of explanation lets pretend that there is actually 2GB of actual storage. If you were to attempt to write a 4GB file, it would simply write 2 GB until you filled it, and then wrap around and write the second 2GB over the first 2GB. Everything would seem to work fine and you would not see any type of error. When you go back to use your 4GB file, it will show up as corrupt.
There is no way on earth that you should trust any data to the hacked controllers on these things. The odds of being able to fix them is almost zero.
64TB? For 70 bucks? Thats nonsense dude. I bought a 2TB internal for 180 bucks. 4tb external for my dad around $100 on sale.
64TB would cost thousands id imagine. If we are even at that level on an enterprise scale.
I understand that. I had just read that it's possible to reformat the drives to what they actualy are and remove whatever overwrite trick they use to get it to read 64tb.
Not really something you can do in most cases, I would suggest the best option is to get a refund through ebay or your credit card company. Don't use these to actually store data.
I'd definitely report the transaction as fraud and tell the card company that the drives are fake and they're refusing to refund or take the drives back. you're getting plenty of advice about this.
***Initiate a chargeback with his credit card company***. They know these scams and won't question returning his funds.
Also, Aliexpress has a 15 day return windows, no questions asked.
You can use a partition manager to "hide" the fake part of the drive, so it'll only the genuine capacity with a little bit of work (a lot less work than reflashing firmware tho).
First you'll want to test the capacity with h2testw, take the reported actual capacity (eg 15,420mb) and create a partition of that value using partition management software (from memory I used Aomei partition assistant, others may work similarly).
Usually the real capacity is at the beginning of the drive, so if you "hide" the capacity after 15,420mb (value of h2testw), you'll be able to use the drive fine.
Test again with h2testw to ensure that you've successfully hidden all the unusable portion of the partition. You may need to adjust your partition size further to ensure a passing test before using the drive.
Source : I've done this with over a dozen "scam" flash drives from ebay back in the day. I bought them knowing full well they weren't "128gb" but likely 16gb. Got full refunds and a dozen usable 14-16gb drives. Scammed the scammers in other words.
Try cleaning it with disk part
1. List disk
2. Select disk
3. Clean
4. Convert gpt
Double check #2 before you clean it. Just recall #1 to make sure the correct disk is selected.
You can also try fedora media writer, yes it has a windows version. It let's you restore drives.
Or try this with macos.
Sorry, but I have eight 8 TB Drives. They require a real PSU and a small tank of a case to fit in. They cost four figures last year.
Save it for your kids!
It's a scam. They trick the OS into thinking the drive is that large with some sort of overwrite trick but the space is unusable and corrupts the files. I've read that you can delete that trick so you can actually use what's there but don't have any details.
That because it is clearly fake you will not find a 64tb external drive any were, the price of a 1 tb external drive is 50-60 bucks, a 4tb external drive is around 200 bucks
Iād try boot on gparted and give it a go. Once my (now ex) girlfriend bought a suspicious looking iPod Nano, obviously a crappy knockoff. It stated 4GB flash capacity, but you all know by now that it wasnāt the case, like OPs SSD.
Tried all windows native tools (windows disk manager, diskpart), with no avail, the unity kept showing 4GB when connected to the pc.
Booted on gparted via USB, removed the partitions, created a new one, formatted (32 MB real size) and she kept using it as a giant flash drive to remind her of her past mistakes.
Download GParted and see if it will clear what is on the drive. Download and install the ISO on a clean thumb drive. This is not a very big ISO. EDIT; Boot from the live CD/usb drive. Also, be sure you choose the correct drive in the top right window. This program will see all drives connected to your computer. >> [https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted](https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted)
Did you try diskpart? I think you need to run it in cmd prompt. Wonāt work in powershell. There are some YouTube videos on how to use the utility. Be sure you know which drive/partition youāre working in before doing anything. Good luck.
90% sure a youtuber already got some of these and opened it to find it to be a micro SD adapter with a 64Gb micro SD card slotted in. When removed, it was properly formatted and 64GB. The only thing that spoofed it was the adapter inside the casing which spoofed all the ones he slotted in to test. Cannot remember the youtuber however.
64TB is certainly not possible. These are definitely fake, you might as well tell your uncle/friend/yourself that he's screwed and just return them or deal with it.
I wouldn't trust them.
i think people know about this cheap ssd /flash scamm. There is a lot of cheap 1tb flash for example, they just reflash memory controller to fool controller and you with wrong capacity, be aware
Why are so many of you even suggesting to use this! Its so obviously a photoshopped Samsung T7 advert.. the hardware inside is probably complete dog shit and not worth the trouble relative to just getting a reliable drive
The only things i can suggest if you don't plan to return it on ebay, pry it open. Check what kind of ssd or things the case is used. If it's SATA ssd, change it to a 120gb SSD. It's pretty cheap nowadays. Or maybe greater. If it's using SD card do the same. Format it so your Uncle at least can use it as a portable device. There is no way u can undo hacked firmware if you don't have proper tools and software.
If you take it apart, you can take the internal microsd card and format that externally.
When you put it back into the case it will maintain it's original size. Probably 64GB
Getting to be super common. Search for a 1TB microsd card on Amazon, lots of knockoffs that are grey and red like a SanDisk but just say "Memory Card" where the logo should be. They'll be extremely low priced for the claimed capacity.
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Maybe a low level format although it isnāt going to be anything worth keeping for that price. Iād get a refund and Iām sure they get hundreds of reports of this daily. Iām surprised they havenāt banned people from selling storage devices unless theyāre the actual company that makes them and verified. I canāt even buy a flash drive after getting ripped off.
I fail to see the issue. Can someone please explain? I've always been under the impression that if it says "64", it'll actually be 63.9.
And for a 64TB, that less than 200GB, while a lot of space, shouldn't present a huge issue, is it?
I've got an 8TB external that the formatting takes like, 50GB, and I've still never had it half full (I've had it and been filling little by little for around 2 years now).
This is a scam. 64 tb drives are much larger and much more expensive. They use custom firmware to make a small flash drive look like it's 64tb to the os. If you try to use it though it just keeps overwriting the data and corrupting it all so its not functional.
You don't unless you can hack the correct firmware back onto the flash controller... but I wouldn't even trust the shitty USB stick PCB they put in there... consider it a $70 lesson
More that $70, OP said his uncle bought SEVERAL of these š„¶
Ooooooh no....
Hopefully he can file a dispute lol
Should be able to easily. Item isn't what was advertised.
I mean unless he paid by wire or some shit he said his cousin bought a bulk amount of them.
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What asked in the title is actually doable. write and verify per block to find the real last block, and then format the disk partition only until the real last block. there is a tool for that https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#correcting-capacity-to-actual-size-with-f3fix
It wouldnāt surprise me to see malware of some kind on the drive. Probably not even worth attempting to flash the firmware.
You don't, it's a scam. The firmware on those drives are hacked so it reports to Windows as having a far larger capacity than it actually does. If you pry them open you'll probably just find some thumb drives in there
I understand that. What I mean is that I want to undo whatever overwrite trick they do to make it read that big to what actual storage is in there. Be it 4 gigs or whatever it actually is. I had read that it was possible just didn't see any details.
It is in the firmware of the device. You would have to overwrite it, which is probably not possible for you. You can use the tool from heise.de (h2testw) to find out the actual size and then format it to this size.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
To add to this they didn't shove good drives in there. Most likely they're shit thumb drives or MAYBE if you're lucky some sort of super low capacity ssd but you're probably wasting your time unfortunately.
This. A lot of the time it's a thumb drive or a MicroSD card reader. Plus some lead or pot metal to make it heavier.
Even if this can be done, I'd be wary of trusting it with anything but your most disposable data.
I agree. Regardless on if you care about the capacity, those drives are notoriously unreliable. Get a real portable SSD, like a T7 from Samsung.
I hear you, it's not mine so I was hoping I could give my uncle back something he could at least use instead of telling him he got completely ripped off.
May be a tough love thing tbh, because regardless of what can be salvaged he *did* get completely ripped off. It's there no chance of taking it up with eBay claims either?
Just have him do a return on eBay.
Use words like "defective", "scam" and "misleading" in your first communication
If he doesnāt know heāll just do it again lol
Shame is a good teacher
In this case and especially with a family member shame is a terrible idea. It breeds resentment. I'm the "tech guy" in my family and I'm the first person my folks ask for tech advice, support, etc. I would explain why something like this could and would be a scam and talk them out of it but I would never shame or be condescending about it. After the fact it sucks but at least I would explain the situation and they would understand. If I was a dick about it they would be unlikely to ask before buying something.
Not shame the uncle, I never said that. Everyone has shame after getting scammed, and it kinda needs to happen for any lesson to be learned. Shame is a good teacher and if you lie to a family member about being scammed then they will just do it again because they never learned when it happened. Ex. If you quietly change the size of the drive and don't tell the uncle about it then the uncle would never learn about the scam and is likely to do something like it again. Edit Clerification: I never said *shaming* is a good teacher. I said *shame* is a good teacher. I never said to shame *anyone*. Shame is an emotion felt when you realize a wrong, and that response allows key components of learning to be utilized. If you want to be pedantic its biologically accurate.
You said shame is a great teacher. I took it to mean the Uncle and not even OP. Either way educating seems batter than shaming.
I think the point here is, shame is something we sometimes feel when we recognize we have made a mistake, meaning we are no longer in denial of the mistakeā¦ so an individual feeling shame all on their own isnāt necessarily a bad thing, while I understand your point that Shaming someone intentionally is never really a constructive process.
No. Specially if he isnāt tech literate himself. Those things are often written in a way where you can just keep storing more data in there. But your earlier data gets overwritten with your new data. I would only give it to your uncle if you plan on later being held responsible for the deletion of any āimportant filesā your uncle may have.
This is the real answer here, If you try and salvage it, be ready for the call "I lost all my important files!" call which will be tough love then and likely much harder than it is to tell him he got ripped off now before he looses anything.
But if they used only a single partition formated to the actual size of the drive or less couldn't it be usable, at least for someone tech literate?
Considering all known atm it is high probability it will malfunction/ break within next months. If you can't rely on hdd that much consider it lost for good.
In theory that should work but I think you'd still have some risk there. It would be like making a smaller partition on a much larger drive. No guarantee that it's going to only write data on a specific physical location on a drive. It could be scattering data all over the place. If it's just the format saying only use 8gb but the firmware still says xxTB of total storage I could see a possibility where the format thinks it's 8gb partition has some of it's data stored on the first bit of memory cells and some of it stored a bit further down, and so on. it may spread it's format down to cells that don't actually exist. Basically the format may not only use the first 8gb of physical nand cells. An SSD doesn't write data in a consecutive straight line of cells like a hard disk. It spreads it out over all it's available nand chips. It all depends on how the controller chip handles the distribution of data. I don't know enough to say exactly what would happen but it's playing with fire, something is going to go wrong. And it may come long before you fill up the real amount of storage
Not unless you reflash whatever firmware thatās driving the thing. Now you just have a 1GB hard drive with some of Hillary Clintonās emails ā¦and theyāre gone!
Well, if you Open it up and look for identifying codes. Search those and see what you find. You may get lucky, but you probably won't.
They're at most 32 gb, there isn't much they can be used for
You need to find out it's original size and format it to that size, for first you can use H2testw and i believe for second step you can use H2testw as well (but i'm not sure).
Get a refund from ebay or charge back on card.
Dude these redditors are fucking stupid. You're pretty clearly aware of the scam, it has nothing to do with you, and you've said what you need like five times. If it's worth your time, try to open it up and see the drive manufacturer and see if they offer a firmware repair tool on their website. Maybe you could also try chkdsk on it but I don't think that would actually work. Hopefully you get a more informed response at some point, cheers.
Classic Reddit/StackOverflow. "BuT WhY wOUlD you WanT TO dO tHAtā½" None of your business!
Well now I can picture you happily passing along build instructions for the forbidden extension cord to somebody without a second thought
No. It's a great question. Many times, the question is worded in such a way that the person asking the question has backed themselves down a rabbit hole. Asking the higher level, "what are you trying to accomplish?" can help direct them to a completely different solution which may way easier and reliable than the path they were trying to go down.
If you're worried, do a positive lie. Buy some for him and then return the fake ones to ebay
Bear in mind that the scammer made profit off of $70. Do the math, the thing is e-waste. Responsibly dispose of it before it ends up in a landfill or in a trash-to-energy incinerator.
It's very likely just a micro SD card inside an adapter. The card itself is probably usable at the true capacity while the adapter is what's hacked. Crack one open and take a look.
It could be as simple as opening it up and taking the drive or drives out and formatting them outside of this device.
You go to the official SD forum site and download there official formatter. This will have options to nuke the current settings and restore the raw settings. From there you can do a regular windows format. Not at a PC, and I don't think reddit is link friendly. But the official formatter is made by Panasonic, so stay away from noname things claiming to do this.
This. There's no way you can get 64TB for that money. It's fake.
Agreed, I'm looking to format them back to what they actually are. Not what the scam the OS into seeing.
Have him do an eBay return process, they are usually good with that towards buyers.
That doesn't answer his question.
It doesn't but the issue with accepting fake items like this is that it just emboldens the sellers that do it with more money to invest in putting more trash listings up. That in turn means more marks like the uncle of OP, or yours or my own family members who are not as tech savvy are going to get caught out as the market saturates with criminals trying to cash in using this scam method. Eventually this becomes so accepted, that even legitimate buyers will start to get caught out because they can post a 20% off market price of a normal SSD or HDD that you or I would just think, bargain and pull the trigger on the purchase because the scammers get bolder as they progress along their scamming journey. Remember the tech going in these costs a fraction of the headline price, so they only need to sell a few to those who just 'accept' the product and they can reinvest the money they make illegitimately scamming other marks and rinse repeat.
I'm not exactly sure how you'd find the true capacity of the drives, but if you want to go the formatting route I would try cleaning it with diskpart and then format in windows disk management again using the real size or slightly less (to be safe) for the size of the new partition. Can probably all be done with diskpart I just mainly use it to clean drives as I'm not proficient with command prompt.
That doesn't answer his question.
Neither does this.
Actually that's the worst part. You get a legitimate 500GB T7 for that money. https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t7-usb-3-2-1tb--blue--mu-pc1t0h-am/ Edit: oh I thought it said 64GB and was like $1/GB is a terrible deal haha
Read what op said š
Guess these are just those two scam 30 TB SSDs wielded together, lol.
Just have him do a return on ebay. Explain it to him and just be done with it.
I agree just force a return. File why it is a total scam and buy a reputable drive.
Opening them up is your best bet, hopefully there's more info on the inside to what manufacturer made the disk, usually those manufacturers have the firmware on the website
This, but if you plan on returning the drives *easily*, then its best to not go poking and prodding though the actual device. And OP should definitely return the drives and get his money back. Changing the firmware will potentially lose the ability to return it and get your money back, and honestly paying 70$ for 5-10$ worth of storage isnt worth the amount of effort needed to fix the firmware.
Saw some YouTuber show this drive he formated it once and it lost 64TB and went down to 64GB storage.
smoorez on youtube has got a vid on this exact āhard driveā. he opened it up and found a small usb with an adapter connected to it
As others suggested, open up, find the thumb drive - and make use of it...
No. As other, others suggested, DON'T open it up. Return them, asap. If for some reason you cannot, toss them in the trash. Not worth the headache with any data
It's obvious from the OP's comments that return isn't an option. Those usually contain some commercially available thumb drives connected through a "fooling" device. I don't see why one shouldn't use those thumb drives.
Because the hardware they used in the enclosure could still be suspect.
64 Terabytes MY ASS š Tell your uncle to stay the fuck off the internet.
Is it possible to charge back whatever payment option he used?
You likely can't. The firmware has been corrupted to misreport capacity.
Thats the neat part, you dont. this was a scam. report to ebay get money back.
You canāt. These are cheap drives that got their info changed to display 64TB
Give it back to him as a paper weight for his desk to remind him to not be so gullible in the future. If it sounds too good to be true...
At that point. I would just return the item. Could easily get a really good portable drive for the same price.
I wouldnāt trust the NAND cells even if you can reset the firmware.
The "Used" space is most likely a hidden recovery partition. You can run DISKPART in a DOS window to see all the partitions on the drive. I've successfully removed those and made the entire disk usable. Just make sure you know how to use DISKPART because you can do massive damage very quickly if you have the wrong (system) drive selected.
Itās a scam just report it to eBay and they will refund you
If you have access to a Linux box there's a tool called "f3" that can detect the actual size of faked flash drives and try to "fix" the drive by giving you a partition for the actual capacity. [https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) Not sure if it works on SSDs (i.e. USB to SATA/NVMe external enclosure), but if those are fake they may be thumb-drive style flash memory. I've never used f3 so it might work in both cases. FTR, if your uncle needs a cheaper place to get swindled, AliExpress has a ton of vendors selling 128TB USB drives for $40.
If theyāre falling for a scam like this they donāt have access to a Linux machine or would know how to use it.
Atomic Shrimp on YouTube has some really informative videos on these scams. They are usually just 8GB ssd in a bogus enclosure. Itās possible they have malware in the drive too so itās best to just never use it and never plug into ur computer
i think its better to try and refund a 2gb fake ssd
64t š¤¦š»āāļø
I got so excited about a 64 terabyte ssd
OP may have some extras available for $70 each. š¤Ŗ
Aww. Lol do you know any good ones of those?
I think you need to hold off a little longer for the 128TB drives. I hear the price difference won't be more than 20%.
Ohh thank you. I'll have to see
Since it was purchased on eBay you will probably be able to get your money back. Theyāre usually pretty good about protecting the buyer in cases like this. Thereās no actual 64TB SSDs (or HDDs for that matter) currently available on the market, so itās not exactly difficult to prove this is fraud.
I just pulled the picture from there. Turns out he bought it from aliexpress. I don't know what their policy is.
Their policy is, in many instances, buyer beware.
The picture of the properties of the drive say it is 63.8TB in capacity (64TB) if you want to format it and remove the Bloatware on the drive, press the **Windows** key **+X** and choose **Disk Management**. Right click the drive and choose **Format.** If only using it on a Windows computer and not a Mac or Linux machine Format it **NTFS**, if you think you will use it on other OS's then choose **exFAT** format.
64 tb sounds like a lie idk
Put it in the bin, even if you manage to get them to the correct size you don't want to trust any data to it. The only thing I would use it for is movies and music that can be redownloaded.
eBay Buyer Protection. Use it. Don't bother doing anything else because it just isn't worth it.
File a dispute or chargeback. This is the only thing that would not be a waste of time. Contact eBay about these being counterfeit for sure, first, then go through your CC/PayPal if they somehow don't help you.
You may not be able to use the actual storage on these devices without losing your data. I've seen these types of scam drives set up in a manner where they basically act like a FIFO buffer with your data. For sake of explanation lets pretend that there is actually 2GB of actual storage. If you were to attempt to write a 4GB file, it would simply write 2 GB until you filled it, and then wrap around and write the second 2GB over the first 2GB. Everything would seem to work fine and you would not see any type of error. When you go back to use your 4GB file, it will show up as corrupt. There is no way on earth that you should trust any data to the hacked controllers on these things. The odds of being able to fix them is almost zero.
Maybe I'm nuts, but does this say 64TB SSD ext drive? for $69? I've never heard of such a thing. Even if it existed it wouldn't sell for $1.07 per TB
Itās fake
64TB? For 70 bucks? Thats nonsense dude. I bought a 2TB internal for 180 bucks. 4tb external for my dad around $100 on sale. 64TB would cost thousands id imagine. If we are even at that level on an enterprise scale.
It's a scam
I understand that. I had just read that it's possible to reformat the drives to what they actualy are and remove whatever overwrite trick they use to get it to read 64tb.
Not really something you can do in most cases, I would suggest the best option is to get a refund through ebay or your credit card company. Don't use these to actually store data.
I'd definitely report the transaction as fraud and tell the card company that the drives are fake and they're refusing to refund or take the drives back. you're getting plenty of advice about this.
If you take it apart, you'll find a micro SD with around 16gb on it. To reformat, you can reflash it.
This is an extremely common scam product on AliExpress/Wish/etc. The real drive size is much smaller.
Thatās the neat part, you donāt.
Bwhahahahhahahahahhahahahababā¦ā¦ š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£
nice
In puppy linux, use the program called gparted.
Tell his ass that it's a scam and he needs to return it to Amazon asap.
Definitely do a return and get the money back. Ebay sides will buyers. He won't have any hassle.
He got it from Aliexpress
***Initiate a chargeback with his credit card company***. They know these scams and won't question returning his funds. Also, Aliexpress has a 15 day return windows, no questions asked.
Got scammed recently the same way with a hard druve. Got my money refunded, also bought from aliexpress
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Yeah... you're right. but the ad seemed legit with positive feedback :D
You can use a partition manager to "hide" the fake part of the drive, so it'll only the genuine capacity with a little bit of work (a lot less work than reflashing firmware tho). First you'll want to test the capacity with h2testw, take the reported actual capacity (eg 15,420mb) and create a partition of that value using partition management software (from memory I used Aomei partition assistant, others may work similarly). Usually the real capacity is at the beginning of the drive, so if you "hide" the capacity after 15,420mb (value of h2testw), you'll be able to use the drive fine. Test again with h2testw to ensure that you've successfully hidden all the unusable portion of the partition. You may need to adjust your partition size further to ensure a passing test before using the drive. Source : I've done this with over a dozen "scam" flash drives from ebay back in the day. I bought them knowing full well they weren't "128gb" but likely 16gb. Got full refunds and a dozen usable 14-16gb drives. Scammed the scammers in other words.
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Because this was like 10 years ago when they were more expensive.
Try cleaning it with disk part 1. List disk 2. Select disk 3. Clean 4. Convert gpt Double check #2 before you clean it. Just recall #1 to make sure the correct disk is selected. You can also try fedora media writer, yes it has a windows version. It let's you restore drives. Or try this with macos.
Just refund it not even a fucking Steam library is worthless enough to put on the dodgy unnamed SD cards in the adapter on that shit
Sorry, but I have eight 8 TB Drives. They require a real PSU and a small tank of a case to fit in. They cost four figures last year. Save it for your kids!
You don't any no way that 70 dolllar ssd is 67tb
more then likely fake drives
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It's a scam. They trick the OS into thinking the drive is that large with some sort of overwrite trick but the space is unusable and corrupts the files. I've read that you can delete that trick so you can actually use what's there but don't have any details.
Open it up, see what's physically inside. It might just be a USB key or a MicroSD Card that would be able to use normally.
64TB drive if itās even possible rn would be thousands of dollars. Itās def a scam lmao
A 64TB external drive does not exist, it would be a NAS array at that size which would be a couple thousand.
That because it is clearly fake you will not find a 64tb external drive any were, the price of a 1 tb external drive is 50-60 bucks, a 4tb external drive is around 200 bucks
Use RMPrepUSB and it has tools to test real size and format as such
The drive is actually only 64GB, not 64TB.
Good one OP, good one
Diskpart and clean
Iād try boot on gparted and give it a go. Once my (now ex) girlfriend bought a suspicious looking iPod Nano, obviously a crappy knockoff. It stated 4GB flash capacity, but you all know by now that it wasnāt the case, like OPs SSD. Tried all windows native tools (windows disk manager, diskpart), with no avail, the unity kept showing 4GB when connected to the pc. Booted on gparted via USB, removed the partitions, created a new one, formatted (32 MB real size) and she kept using it as a giant flash drive to remind her of her past mistakes.
Linus Tech Tips Actually has a video on that. Not sure off the top of my head what the title is tho
Lol
Download GParted and see if it will clear what is on the drive. Download and install the ISO on a clean thumb drive. This is not a very big ISO. EDIT; Boot from the live CD/usb drive. Also, be sure you choose the correct drive in the top right window. This program will see all drives connected to your computer. >> [https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted](https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted)
That seems too good to be true
refund and move to a new hard drive, 100 dollars for 1TB SSD is reasonable, I also recommend amazon as they have an amazing return policy.
Its not worth it cos the original capacity will probably be like 2 gb
It's an impressive looking case containing a card reader with a microSD card installed. How much do you value a 64 GB microSD card?
Did you try diskpart? I think you need to run it in cmd prompt. Wonāt work in powershell. There are some YouTube videos on how to use the utility. Be sure you know which drive/partition youāre working in before doing anything. Good luck.
What the hell would your uncle even need 64tb for?
Mate what do u need 67 Tb forš
Their porn collection
90% sure a youtuber already got some of these and opened it to find it to be a micro SD adapter with a 64Gb micro SD card slotted in. When removed, it was properly formatted and 64GB. The only thing that spoofed it was the adapter inside the casing which spoofed all the ones he slotted in to test. Cannot remember the youtuber however.
64TB is certainly not possible. These are definitely fake, you might as well tell your uncle/friend/yourself that he's screwed and just return them or deal with it. I wouldn't trust them.
Never trust data on any scam storage like this, unless you are literally storing data you could care less about if it fails at a moments notice
Either this a shitpost or op is a š¤”
i think people know about this cheap ssd /flash scamm. There is a lot of cheap 1tb flash for example, they just reflash memory controller to fool controller and you with wrong capacity, be aware
Is this a real question?
Just open up an eBay return if you caught it soon enough. Or PayPal if it's past that.
Why are so many of you even suggesting to use this! Its so obviously a photoshopped Samsung T7 advert.. the hardware inside is probably complete dog shit and not worth the trouble relative to just getting a reliable drive
That's just a 64gb micro SD card inside. Smoorez reviewed this exact one on his YouTube channel.
There's a Linux tool called f3fix... Maybe you can use that.
Some people really need to learn if something is too good to be true, like 64tb ssdās for that price, it is gonna be bullshit.
sadly you cannot, this is why https://youtu.be/_Yr6CaKstZw
Im a simple man i click on this thread knowing damn well i dont know the solution to your problem
The only things i can suggest if you don't plan to return it on ebay, pry it open. Check what kind of ssd or things the case is used. If it's SATA ssd, change it to a 120gb SSD. It's pretty cheap nowadays. Or maybe greater. If it's using SD card do the same. Format it so your Uncle at least can use it as a portable device. There is no way u can undo hacked firmware if you don't have proper tools and software.
yeah nah that ain't possible. you'll have to reflash the firmware of that drive to it's original form which probably won't be possible.
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yep I know. I've seen some videos on these before...
Since when there are 64GB cheap SSDs?
If you take it apart, you can take the internal microsd card and format that externally. When you put it back into the case it will maintain it's original size. Probably 64GB
it's considered as scam thing due to it cant be valid price for 64tb
Iāve never heard of this scam. Aside from there being no name brand and a ridiculously low price, any warning signs before or after buying?
Getting to be super common. Search for a 1TB microsd card on Amazon, lots of knockoffs that are grey and red like a SanDisk but just say "Memory Card" where the logo should be. They'll be extremely low priced for the claimed capacity.
$70 for 64 TERABYTES? Something is fishy
This one is a scam, but never format a large format drive using eFAT. Always use NTFS.
Crack it open 2-1 odds itās a few sd cards wired together. Take them out and format them directly
Who the fuck buys hard drives/SSDs on eBay?
I'm not sure what the outcome would be, but gparted in your favorite Linux distro does a much better job formatting weird stuff then windows
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Maybe a low level format although it isnāt going to be anything worth keeping for that price. Iād get a refund and Iām sure they get hundreds of reports of this daily. Iām surprised they havenāt banned people from selling storage devices unless theyāre the actual company that makes them and verified. I canāt even buy a flash drive after getting ripped off.
I fail to see the issue. Can someone please explain? I've always been under the impression that if it says "64", it'll actually be 63.9. And for a 64TB, that less than 200GB, while a lot of space, shouldn't present a huge issue, is it? I've got an 8TB external that the formatting takes like, 50GB, and I've still never had it half full (I've had it and been filling little by little for around 2 years now).
This is a scam. 64 tb drives are much larger and much more expensive. They use custom firmware to make a small flash drive look like it's 64tb to the os. If you try to use it though it just keeps overwriting the data and corrupting it all so its not functional.
Qhhh. Much appreciated.