Have you ever seen this adorable cartoon USB flash drive? Are you planning on buying one from eBay, Qoo10 or any other popular online e-commerce site? If your answer is “Yes” or “Maybe”, then this article is a “must read” for you! Anyway, bear with me, this would be a long article, hopefully it isn’t boring for you?
The available capacity would be 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB with cheap prices that are almost irresistible, most of us are very tempted to buy those above 32GB, well, yes, including myself. I have bought not once but twice 64GB and they always have problem after a period of time, files and pictures corrupted etc.. Lesson unlearnt at that time, only till last year.
Since this happened twice I just googled around hoping to get more information, to my horror, I realize that I have bought the flash drives with fake capacity after running a test software calls “FakeFlashTest.exe”!
Well, the second time I just bought an OTG (on the go) usb 64GB, despite that the price was not very cheap, about $SGD$28 (inclusive oversea shipping), and yes, it is still reasonably cheaper as compared to if you had bought it at any local store. I thought with such a price it would have the stated capacity, right? Oh NO, I was totally wrong!
I will run through the various steps of this Fake Flash Test software and provide a download link at the end of this post, hope this will help anyone out there who are interested in buying any usb flash drive that the price is too good to be true!
Next picture shows the size that you first see when you plug in the usb flash drive, many people would be tricked into believing this is the true capacity and post good reviews. Be alert! DON’T trust what you see at this point!
For the next 2 steps shown, simply press “OK” to continue, don’t worry, the flash drive won’t be defective even after you have run the test!
When the software starts to run, you will see the running process as shown below.
The next few pictures will show the test results: The fake “true face”!
Ok, at this point what we can see is that it says there is about 20GB usable, if you want to continue using the USB drive, at your own risk, oh well, you can of course, but I would advice you not to store anything that is important!
For those who interested to dig out further, you can also write a batch file to fill the USB Drive up with lots of identical copies of test images (test.bmp) to see how many it can hold. You can take a photo using your handphone and rename the picture to “test.bmp”. After that we will create a batch file. Open up Windows Notepad. Copy & Paste the following lines of code into notepad.
cls
@ECHO OFF
ECHO. ********************
ECHO. Fake USB Drive Check
ECHO. ********************
ECHO. Test File duplicator
ECHO. ********************
ECHO.
PAUSE
SET var=1
:LOOP
ECHO Creating file No.”%var%”
set /a var=%var%+1
COPY h:\test.bmp h:\test”%var%”.bmp
GOTO LOOP
Look out for “COPY h:\test.bmp h:\test”%var%”.bmp”. Replace the “h” with the drive letter of your USB Drive. Attention: EDIT the correct Drive letter, you don’t want to fill up the wrong drive! Save the file as TEST.BAT on your desktop.
Now with you USB Drive plugged in, double click on the TEST.BAT file you have made. Your USB Drive will slowly fill up with copies of “test.bmp”. Note that the batch file is a quick and dirty loop which will take up quite a long time to complete especially you have a large Drive. I would not bother to use this method to test those beyond 16GB. I will still recommend you to use Fake Flash test software as it will be very much faster!
When your USB drive is full you will see it start counting very fast and display “there is not enough space on the disk” to stop this loop, simply close the window.
Then, give Windows a few moments to build the thumbnails. Now you can scroll down the USB Drive window. If you see lots of images that “ALL look the SAME” – Congratulation – your USB drive is fine!
However, if any of the images look weird or incomplete i.e. has a large grey block cover up the picture or some of the files remain icons and won’t change to thumbnails etc.. Then I’m afraid to tell you that you have probably bought a fake USB Drive – 😥 sobs!
OK, now how about the good USB flash drive? The fake flash test result will be as follows:
Congratulation! Simply format your Drive and you are good to go!
I have a friend who also bought a 64GB cute Minion USB flash drive (see below) and I have tested out for her by running both tests (Fake Flash test and batch file), the result was worst. Usable capacity less than 8GB! Don’t trust the online seller telling you their product has full capacity if the selling price is too good to be true!
Oh yes, before I call it a day, here is the link to download the FakeFlashTest, I am using version 1.0.9, scroll all the way down the page and you will see “FAKEFLASHTEST_v1.0.9.zip”.
Fyi, I have downloaded version 1.1.1 but my Norton antivirus software has quarantined it the moment I run it so just to be on the safe side, version 1.0.9 does the job well! You can read up more on that page especially where the author explains about the two types of fake drives.
Important: Practice caution at all times, scan the file with anti-virus software before you run or install it!
I particularly like what he says here:
98% of these sellers are selling ‘fake’ USB Flash drives (fake UFDs) – either knowingly, unknowingly or I-don’t-really-want-to-know-ingly!RMPrepUSB
Final thought: I am contemplating to buy an adorable cartoon 32GB flash drive to try on, will choose those sellers that don’t sell beyond 64GB and with a reasonable pricing, maybe I will hit the jackpot of the 2% good sellers out there? Wish me luck 😉 ?