Samsung Bar deal

[g-coder05]

I wasn’t quite sure where to stick this, CNC, Cad/Cam, For Sale...
Anyway, a few years ago we were having some drip feed issues with our Sandisk sticks and a guy gave me a Samsung Bar 3.1 USB stick and it fixed the problem. I had a couple of these now but needed several more now that i've started dicking around with the Raspberry Pi's. I checked amazon and they were in the $40 range for the 256 gig plus shipping so I did some searching on Lazada and came across a smoking deal. $5.20 a pop and $0.30 cents international shipping.

The price made me a bit skeptical as well as coming from China but I deiced to order 2 pieces. They arrived here a little while ago and if they the’re knockoffs they are better than the real ones. Samsung list them as 300mb/s, I ran a scan and got just under 500mb/s!

I know most are gonna shun the china bit but since all the USB memory pretty much comes from china may as well save $34 bucks a pop. If you guys need some heres the link.....

Samsung Bar

Tiny little fkrs too

 

[lobust]

I wasn’t quite sure where to stick this, CNC, Cad/Cam, For Sale...
Anyway, a few years ago we were having some drip feed issues with our Sandisk sticks and a guy gave me a Samsung Bar 3.1 USB stick and it fixed the problem. I had a couple of these now but needed several more now that i've started dicking around with the Raspberry Pi's. I checked amazon and they were in the $40 range for the 256 gig plus shipping so I did some searching on Lazada and came across a smoking deal. $5.20 a pop and $0.30 cents international shipping.

The price made me a bit skeptical as well as coming from China but I deiced to order 2 pieces. They arrived here a little while ago and if they the’re knockoffs they are better than the real ones. Samsung list them as 300mb/s, I ran a scan and got just under 500mb/s!

I know most are gonna shun the china bit but since all the USB memory pretty much comes from china may as well save $34 bucks a pop. If you guys need some heres the link.....

Samsung Bar

Tiny little fkrs too
View attachment 929

By far the most common fake storage from China comes in the form of altered firmware that reports a much higher capacity than is actually available - for example, a 64GB drive sold as (and reported by the system as) a 128GB drive.

It's a successful scam because the drive will appear to be working at first. Then when the real capacity is exceeded the controller will simply overwrite already allocated NAND, and then you get file corruption, missing files, partitions that simply disappear, and so on and so forth.

Always, if there's any doubt, fill the drive completely and check that you can copy everything back off it again with no corruption.

 

[g-coder05]

By far the most common fake storage from China comes in the form of altered firmware that reports a much higher capacity than is actually available - for example, a 64GB drive sold as (and reported by the system as) a 128GB drive.

It's a successful scam because the drive will appear to be working at first. Then when the real capacity is exceeded the controller will simply overwrite already allocated NAND, and then you get file corruption, missing files, partitions that simply disappear, and so on and so forth.

Always, if there's any doubt, fill the drive completely and check that you can copy everything back off it again with no corruption.

Oh yeah, I started dragging 4k movies off my movie site stream server and got it within 5 gig of it's capacity to see what the transfer time was and she took it all.

Thats the thing about that website. Its tailored to each countries economic status. Since in my case its targeting the Philippines they know nobody here can afford a $40 USB drive when the average salary is $7 a day.

Ford does the same thing. Im not sure what a loaded twin turbo raptor cost in USA but mine was $35k new last year. Im guessing double that in the states?

Amazing how big companies have enough margin to target economies.

 

[Vancbiker]

Ford does the same thing. Im not sure what a loaded twin turbo raptor cost in USA but mine was $35k new last year. Im guessing double that in the states?

Amazing how big companies have enough margin to target economies.

Yeah, I can see it. I bought a 2020 Ford Transit van for camping and moto hauling. In round numbers it was $40k. I did order a few extras (the twin turbo ‘ecoboost’ motor is a gem!!!) , but at the end of the day it’s a big sheetmetal box on wheels with a comparatively small amount of mechanical parts. They are building them in large quantities for typical customers as well as Amazon buying large numbers. A 5 month backlog when ordering. There has to be a huge margin on them.

 

[g-coder05]

Welp, @lobust nailed this scam. I ran all the speed test and loaded the USB up and it took it. But,,,, Them counterfeiters have gotten smart to get past that checker that most of the online "Escrow" providers have. Ebay, Lazada, Shopee, Amazon. I tried to pull some files from the Samsung and even though it showed them there they actually had been overwritten. I couldn't figure out WTF was going on until I came across a YT vid of a group of guys exposing Chinese knockoffs. Even this threw them for a "loop" (Pun Intended). What they have done is re-flashed the micro controller that communicates the USB/SD drive to the computer to tell it whatever size they want. To make this more convincing to the test software all the sellers want to see, they have actually made it loop and overwrite the files until it is satisfied the files were written.

After I used the software they linked to check fake externals I checked all my drives. Most of mine came from Walmart, Bestbuy, and Amazon and I'm guessing maybe 10 out of 25 are fake.

 

[Spruewell]

I’ve had a couple of those drives do that to me in the past. Went to retrieve a couple old files from them and they were no good. I just thought it somehow got mishandled, dropped or got wet or even had an issue with data corruption in the initial file transfer. This however makes more sense. Can you post the link for that test software?

 

[g-coder05]

I’ve had a couple of those drives do that to me in the past. Went to retrieve a couple old files from them and they were no good. I just thought it somehow got mishandled, dropped or got wet or even had an issue with data corruption in the initial file transfer. This however makes more sense. Can you post the link for that test software?

It's for mack but several others on google for free for windows and linux.

‎Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

‎Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to...

apps.apple.com

 

[lobust]

Welp, @lobust nailed this scam. I ran all the speed test and loaded the USB up and it took it. But,,,, Them counterfeiters have gotten smart to get past that checker that most of the online "Escrow" providers have. Ebay, Lazada, Shopee, Amazon. I tried to pull some files from the Samsung and even though it showed them there they actually had been overwritten. I couldn't figure out WTF was going on until I came across a YT vid of a group of guys exposing Chinese knockoffs. Even this threw them for a "loop" (Pun Intended). What they have done is re-flashed the micro controller that communicates the USB/SD drive to the computer to tell it whatever size they want. To make this more convincing to the test software all the sellers want to see, they have actually made it loop and overwrite the files until it is satisfied the files were written.

After I used the software they linked to check fake externals I checked all my drives. Most of mine came from Walmart, Bestbuy, and Amazon and I'm guessing maybe 10 out of 25 are fake.

That's a shame, but you know how it is - if it seems too good to be true...

FWIW, I actually thought this was a thing of the past, but I suppose the recent nand shortage has made it profitable again...

 

[g-coder05]

That's a shame, but you know how it is - if it seems too good to be true...

FWIW, I actually thought this was a thing of the past, but I suppose the recent nand shortage has made it profitable again...

The odd part of this is the drive is a 64gb and has blistering read/write speeds and I would have been quite happy dropping $10 for a 64gb and leave a positive review. Now, Because of Lazada's escrow policy the seller has three options.

1. Pay for return shipping and issue refund (Chinese don't get that subsidized shipping for returns, haha).
2. Ship a replacement and risk me sending screenshots of the drive test and have to keep sending more.
3. Refund full price into my Lazada wallet.

They put the money back within 5 minutes of my screenshot being submitted. I'm fine with that, I didn't get the capacity I wanted but I got two nice drives and the scammer got stuck with the bill.

 

[primeholy]

c

The odd part of this is the drive is a 64gb and has blistering read/write speeds and I would have been quite happy dropping $10 for a 64gb and leave a positive review. Now, Because of Lazada's escrow policy the seller has three options.

1. Pay for return shipping and issue refund (Chinese don't get that subsidized shipping for returns, haha).
2. Ship a replacement and risk me sending screenshots of the drive test and have to keep sending more.
3. Refund full price into my Lazada wallet.

They put the money back within 5 minutes of my screenshot being submitted. I'm fine with that, I didn't get the capacity I wanted but I got two nice drives and the scammer got stuck with the bill.

Can you fix it where it works properly?

 

[g-coder05]

c

Can you fix it where it works properly?

The main storage wafer or whatever the correct term for it is actually a real storage device. Inside the drive is also a small micro controller that communicates with the computer its plugged into and the storage wafer.

Inside the plastic casing is a small printed circuit board, which has some power circuitry and a small number of surface-mounted integrated circuits (ICs). Typically, one of these ICs provides an interface between the USB connector and the onboard memory, while the other is the flash memory.

What these bastards do is reprogram this IC's to tell the victim the capacity is larger than it really is when they look at the drive in the tree. How they got really sneaky is if you add more data than the real wafer can hold it just keeps over writing the files until it seemingly copies everything.

This would really suck if you copied a shit load of folders onto a drive and the IC deleted some of the file contents and you delete the source folder you loaded from only to find your folders are there but many of the files are gone.

Once you find out what the real capacity is, it is possible to reprogram the IC to the actual disk size and stop it from looping over. I haven’t gotten that far yet, still watching these nerds that type faster than I talk try to explain the "How To" on YouTube. I know,,,Spending a few hours to learn how to fix a $10 flash drive is not exactly the best use of time but I guess the tinkerer in me is dragging me into the pit.

 

[Spruewell]

The worst part of it is that you end up with a piece of equipment that you can’t trust. When are you going to need to rely on that file to be available only to find out that it’s not really there.

 

[Mud]

The worst part of it is that you end up with a piece of equipment that you can’t trust. When are you going to need to rely on that file to be available only to find out that it’s not really there.

I worry about that with every backup I make. If you copy Mb or GB or even Tb onto a backup disk, HTF do you know that it's there and intact?

 

[Vancbiker]

I worry about that with every backup I make. If you copy Mb or GB or even Tb onto a backup disk, HTF do you know that it's there and intact?

Yep. Because of this, I do my machine backups to 3 different devices. One on the CAD/CAM computer. Another on a thumb drive and another do the memory card. I figure at least one of them hose will always be good in case of need.

 

[Spruewell]

Then with 3 or more backups you have the endless opportunity of pulling an outdated or incomplete file. I call it “G-code roulette”!

“Now which one was the good version of that file?”

 

[g-coder05]

Then with 3 or more backups you have the endless opportunity of pulling an outdated or incomplete file. I call it “G-code roulette”!

“Now which one was the good version of that file?”

Hey now,,,, is there a pun intended??

 

[Vancbiker]

Then with 3 or more backups you have the endless opportunity of pulling an outdated or incomplete file. I call it “G-code roulette”!

“Now which one was the good version of that file?”

Well all 3 backups are done at the same time so no potential for one to be outdated. I back up the machine once a year or whenever I make a parameter change. If a parameter file is incomplete and used to restore the control you will get alarms for missing parameters. The files can be compared in DNC4U and if differences are found, the differences can be compared to the original hardcopy that the machine was delivered with. Also one can look up the definition of a parameter in question and use that help determine which file is correct. At the end of the day, I am 110% confident that between my 3 files and having a hardcopy, I could easily and quickly restore the control after a memory loss.