These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon).
So now I shop at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.
ValiDrive performs a quick, random-sequence spot-check across the drive's entire declared storage space. At every location it verifies the successful storage and retrieval of random (unspoofable) test data.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
The program has been extensively tested, is freely downloadable and comes from a well respected site with a long history in the security business. Steve Gibson announced this development in 2023 and it has been downloaded over 600,000 times.
https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
In addition to this effort, Steve has been creating an in-depth weekly podcast called "Security Now" for over 20 years. An archive of all 1039 podcasts and transcripts can be found online where they are freely downloadable.
In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.
For in-depth analysis, Gibson's "SpinRite" can be used -
The two programs are complimentary but very different. ValiDrive quickly checks for the presence of any storage at 576 locations across a drive's storage media. SpinRite thoroughly, deeply and fully examines, verifies, and exercises any drive's storage media, while also performing comprehensive data recovery if necessary.
So, ValiDrive is a “quickie” test to see whether any storage is present, whereas SpinRite is the heavy hitter that verifies every byte of a drive's storage to verify its integrity and reliability.
SpinRite is a data professional's tool at a hobbyist price - inexpensive, but not free.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.
Windows is….. significantly more challenging.
Spinrite had utility for combating data loss inherent to the HDD medium... I don't like the idea of ValidDrive because it's a paid user tool to fight fraud, that's a bad incentive, you don't want to benefit from that, it should be free and open.
Does this test actually spot modern fakes? My understanding was that they typically used simple modulo addressing such that any write was immediately readable, and even large continuous chunks operated perfectly fine, it just also "overwrote" that address every 4GB or whatever.
https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
Long Live Steve Gibson
It used to be that people would use local brick & mortar stores to examine the item and then buy it cheaper on Amazon.
I now use Amazon to search, then go buy more reliably at the source company itself, a specialized online store, or locally.
It isn't just about getting ripped off, it's about actual personal and household safety. Many categories such as electronics and batteries, I NEVER buy from Amazon, and I also understand any health & beauty products are so rife with sometimes-dangerous counterfeits that they should be also avoided. This is only going to get worse with the current US regime actively dismantling regulation and H&S systems.
- decides which wares (social media posts or products) by sellers are shown to users by automated algorithms
- Makes money when users engage with said wares
- Is owned by a large number of investors
Will, if you believe standard optimization theory and that sellers are clever, devolve into crap.
Smaller online retailers, yeah there was trust issues, but a lot of that was due to ‘do they even exist’ and card fraud (due to someone stealing the numbers). That someone would just ship you bullshit was a rare thought. More like they’d just not actually even exist.
And at the beginning (before it got gamified by every scammer under the sun), Amazon was generally quite reliable (it was very rare to have a fake or fraudulent listing), a good way to get almost anything you needed, and quite fast. Not as fast as brick and mortar where you could walk over and get something (if they had it in stock), but WAY faster than almost any other online retailer.
Shipping bullshit/fakes/counterfeit has really taken off as Amazon has killed competition and ‘scaled’, to the point that Alibaba seems like the saner choice most of the time. Which is just nuts.
I agree on the shop local thing. It may be older/somewhat out of date. It may cost more. But you can see in person if it exists and what it actually looks like, and it’s exceptionally rare to have true fraud at brick and mortar because someone can actually go to jail where you live if it happens.
Random online seller? Good luck, even if it may be actual wire fraud or the like.
https://www.sostocked.com/amazon-commingled-inventory/#pros-...