Beware of buying FAKE USB drives!

There are an increasing number of reports about the presence of FAKE USB drives being discovered in the market. It is discovered that some USB drives are sold with only HALF or even 1/4 of the actual memory capacity as they claimed on the drives. For instance, in a spurious 256M USB drive, inside is actually a 64M flash memory. The firmware inside the drive has been modified with compression software to report 256MB in Windows. It allows copying files over 64M. However, the files that are copied beyond 64MB would be corrupted. It is known that a counterfeit USB drive using "Samsung" branded package is being sold using this cheating technique. Samsung Electronics has already denied any original Samsung branded USB drives are being supplied in their line. The dishonest manufacturers may also use the same technique under other brand names. Therefore, Z-Cyber urges its valued customers to take high precaution about this fraud.

Tips to find out whether your USB drives are genuine

  1. Be suspicious about unreasonably low priced offer on USB drives.
  2. Samsung does NOT offer retail USB drive under their brand except for their OEM channel.
  3. Try copying zipped files to the drive to its maximum capacity, then remove the drive from the computer and then re-insert it. See if the copy zipped files remain intact.
  4. Z-Cyber offer file integrity checking program for you and please download it as below.

Filename: checkcap.exe
Size: 180KB
Date: March 9, 2004

Procedures of check capacity of flash drive

  1. For the flash drive without security partition
  2. Plug in flash drive into the computer USB port and Windows will install the
    driver automatically. Afterwards, in "MY COMPUTER" you will find a new icon "REMOVABLE DISK". This is the location of your flash drive.
  3. Double click the application "checkcap.exe"
  4. Select the drive letter of your flash drive.
  5. Press "Copy" button. The application will generate a large file to your flash drive.
  6. Double click the bottom right icon "Safely Remove Hardware". Select the flash drive and press "Stop" button.
  7. Unplug the flash drive
  8. Re-plug the flash drive again. Press the "Compare" button of the application "checkcap.exe"
  9. If it shows a message box "Compare OK", that means the data is copied into the drive correctly. Or, if it show a message box "Contents different", that means data read from the drive is different from the original data. The drive may have problem or it may be a fake drive.