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Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, can someone explain what is happening here? What's wrong with those products?

They're likely a cheap SD card inside the case with firmware that pretends to be 10TB. When you use them, they appear the correct size, but once you go over the size of the actual SD card (e.g. 256GB) you overwrite existing files and corrupt them.

You can tell that they're fake as the price is unrealistic.

I just searched for the prices of 256GB SD cards and they're about 20$. At this point I guess they put 128 or even 64 gb SD cards, otherwise it makes no sense...

Yeah, they go for the cheap ones so likely not 256GB. The only advantage of the bigger sizes is that it takes longer for the user to corrupt their files which is probably a disadvantage for those users.

Another way to determine if you've got a fake drive is that the I/O speeds will be much slower than a usual SSD.

I really believe that most people don't notice, unless you specifically need the "extreme" speeds that some microSD manufacturer offer.

I think the user journey is sort of like:

- oh let me search for a portable SSD drive with a lot of space

- wow, this one is BIG (1TB!) and costs less than Samsung ones; well who cares, even if it lasts 2 years, it's still 1/2 the price

- buy it

- be fine with the no-brand

- write a great review where you think you got a great deal and you're smarter than those who pay so much for the same size (hahah!! lol!!)

and the irony is that it might indeed last 2 years before they find out that it's BS :D

The scam is that nobody makes 10TB SSDs. Scammers buy a 128 GB SD card, put it in a box, have it report itself as (very slow) 10 TB drive. Joe consumer doesn't fill 128 GB right away, so the drive looks fine at first. Then suddenly fails to write.

They aren't 10 TB products. The storage device (usually an SD card inside a larger case) has been modified to report 10 TB of space but actually has far less than that. Once the actual space has been filled, the device will write over the initial bytes (or some other undesired behavior).

It's not possible to buy 10TB of storage for the prices listed as a hard drive, not to mention as SSD.

If you understand the market value of non-scam SSD storage, the price of basically every item on that page is well into "too good to be true" territory.

Further, a lot of them have the trappings of a scam: e.g., can't spell worth shit, the same product is somehow sold by 15 different companies all with very fake sounding names, etc.

Go to a reputable manufacturer, like Seagate, and find a product. E.g., a 1 TB SSD will set you back $130. Now, the listings here are half the price for 10x? Too good to be true.

They put microSD cards into boxes and sell them as SSD drives :)

Thanks to OS abstractions and all, 90% of people will never notice, or once they do, they remember that too cheap is most of the time scam :)

Well to start with, there's no such thing as a 10TB SSD (currently).

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