4474 - 2TB USB flash drive

That's right a 2TB USB flash drive. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, it is. But for $8 I had to buy one to see what the deal was.

So I got it and plugged it in. And it said on the screen that the capacity was 2TB. Wow. So let's load some files on this little sucker. So I did. I kept loading and loading and loading. Wow.

This is what I got. Except I only paid $8. What a deal. So I unplugged it and set it aside. The next day I plugged it back in. All the files were gone. So I loaded more files on it. Unplugged it, plugged it back in, all the files were gone.

......

Those dots were me spending way to much time trying to figure out what was going wrong. I had been told by a friend that this was a scam. I was trying to figure out how the scam worked. I learned a lot about configuring USB drives. A lot.

But what I finally got down to was this. See the device name saying it's 2000000 MB? (2TB) Look at what it's called. A General Udisk. USB disk, right? Nope.

From an article...

USB Powered Gadgets and more... » What’s the Difference Between USB and UDISK?

With all the gadgets and devices we post about, there’s plenty of merit in veering a little closer to some USB hardware fundamentals and how it communicates with your computer. To highlight this importance, a UDISK Drive and its internal functionality will serve as a comparison.

Simply put, a UDISK is a hard drive in USB form. With magnetic hard drive platters spinning inside an enclosure, UDISKs have a bridge chip regulating the way the drive mounts to an operating system. This chip changes the hard from IDE protocols to USB. Standard USB drives don’t use rotating disks to store data, but use flash memory instead, which enjoys faster speeds as well as increased reliability against shock, pressure, and temperature. Why then do these UDISK drives exist? Because those spinning disks are cheaper to manufacture but they can be sold at the same price as standard flash memory USB drives and the difference may not be clear to users.

As a point to remember: if your USB flash drive mounts as a UDISK on your computer, it means it’s a bad USB drive with firmware that doesn’t match the memory type and controller combination. The drive is saying it’s using flash memory when in reality it’s just a small hard drive. Without the correct firmware in the controller, the USB stick is unstable and the operating system tips users about the problem by calling it a UDISK.

Here’s a great video that shows how the scam works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG-Joa3e5Tk. Go to the 2-minute mark to start watching.

And here is what a real 2TB USB drive looks like and costs.

OK, I found this on Amazon for $1200. No thanks.