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Someone asked me for advice on purchasing a USB pen drive to backup her laptop. She posted a link to a Kingston DataTraveler 310 – 256GB pendrive – on eBay, for £30.
First I thought WOW! But then I Googled for this device, Amazon has it for £500 or so… other places might be able to do it for half that price… So why is this eBay Seller has it so cheap (buy now)?
It’s a fake, of course. There are rip-off merchants out there who can hack a pen drive to report on a computer a fake disk size. There are already 16GB and 32Gb fake drives out there which are ptobably hacked 8GB (if you’re lucky) or 4Gb drives hack to say they are 16GB or 32GB!
The current price for storage is £1 per 1GB, so if you are after a 16GB USB pen drive, then expect to pay £16. Always buy from a reputable seller (for online, you best stick to Amazon or Play). When it’s too good to be true, it is inevitably that!
Be warned! I know Humax owners out there are looking for pen drives and USB hard drives to store and transfer recordings on to…
Not quite the same, but I purchased a fake “32GB Kingston Micro SDHC card” for my phone, this cost £24.95 buy it now on eBay.
This looked genuine enough, and showed up as 32GB in my PC and phone.
I transferred a number of music videos onto it, and these played fine so I put some more on. They seemed to copy as normal, but when I tried to play them, I noticed that quite a few were missing so transferred them again with the same results.
I saw someone on a mobile phone forum who had a similar problem with “32GB” cards purchased on eBay. This mentioned using a program called h2testw.exe to check the card for errors by filling it with test files, then reading them and verifying them.
After I had run h2testw.exe it showed that my “32GB” card was actually only 512MB. I was lucky and returned it to the seller for a full refund.
h2testw.exe can be used to test most kinds of memory including, memory cards, USB flash drives, and USB external hard drives.
To get back on topic, I wanted a larger capacity USB pen drive to use with my PVR’s, and purchased a 32GB flash drive for £19.99 it is a 7DAYSHOP.COM branded device from 7dayshop.com. I ran h2testw.exe on it, and this showed it to be the correct capacity with no errors.
Not USB pen drive I know but I never buy these sort of devices from ebay for this reason:
http://reviews.ebay.com/FAKE-SanDisk-Extreme-Compact-Flash-Cards-Exposed_W0QQugidZ10000000001456539
I have also heard that Amazon Market Place can be dodgy as well (NOT Amazon themselves)
I’ve been using 7dayshop since before they were internet only and I’ve never been let down.
Gerry
I can also report 7 day shop is a reliable (and vat free) source. I have flash memory from them USB Sticks and CF (Nikon digital slr) all with no problems.
[(and vat free)]
Not any more……Thanks to one George Osborne…………
Gerry
Wotan – 16 hours ago »
[and vat free]
Not any more……Thanks to one George Osborne…………
Gerry
According to this morning’s press, ‘Mr Osborne said he would lower the threshold before such goods attract a VAT charge from £18 to £15 by November’ looks like we’ve got a reprive!
Gerry
How about an INFINITE capacity USB drive to store your movies on?
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