A significant high number of eBayers have been deceived by fake pen drives!
Most of the well-known branded counterfeits even have brand new packaging, serial numbers like a real brand.
I was fooled into thinking I could get a 16GB Kingston brand USB flash drive for half of the market price. I bought this 16 GB Kingston drive for Rs.1300 + 200 shipping from the seller “chughgagan786”. I received the item without Kingston’s brand Pack but looks like original Kingston printed "DataTraveler 16GB".
When I connected the drive in my computer, it shows there is 16GB capacity. Every time I copy files onto it they get corrupted. I've tried it on a few machines and every time it crashes, seems to be when I go over 512MBb. The machine shows 16GB in properties though. I formatted it on Wndows XP and tried it again and again, in vain. The pen drive I received is Kingston brand blue color Capless swivel design. I looked at Kingston website and they don’t make a 16GB drive with swivel design/blue color. Their 16GB drives are DataTraveler Vault type!
Finally I've just discovered that this is a FAKE Pen drive. I searched for this problem and found a software - iformat (downloaded from : http://www.mediafire.com/?xrsmsai5rxy ) . This nifty program sorted my FAKE 16GB to its actual size 512MB capacity!
This 16 GB drive is reprogrammed from much smaller cousins 256MB, 512GB, 1GB capacity drives for quick profit! .
In fake pen drives, adding files slowly upto the 'fake' storage size will seem fine as there is some sort of programming, code or application which either compresses or 'fakes' the files you save. For e.g. a 128MB USB Pen Drive re-programmed to 2GB will save 128MB fine, but anything above that is compressed or fake 'hex' data and these files will stop working within days, weeks, or months if you are lucky. Too late to get a refund. Sure the seller will say it was a one-off problem if you have a problem with yours within days, and send you another fake 128MB posing as 2GB and you'll happily delude yourself for a short while until you realise that you ignored your instincts, the alarm bells, and me telling you that you should ask for a refund. Fortunately I caught him before I leave a positive feedback for the seller and informed the same to Paisapay. Now I have to wait till few more days to complete the normal process.
I found the following review in ebay about the Fake pen drives with pictures:
http://reviews.ebay.com/BEWARE-of-FAKE-1GB-2GB-4GB-8GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000001456613
There was a Taiwanese news article which suggested that the controller provider (ie, the IC design house) helped flash card/USB flash drive manufacturers in China to cheat the size:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitimes.com.tw%2Fn%2Farticle.asp%3Fid%3D0000050613_B6TLI47WP40NCFW4Q9HFB&langpair=zh%7Cen&hl=pt-BR&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
I hope this information would be helpful for the people in ebay search for high capacity pen drives!. Either some kind of action is required by ebay to stop this kind of fraud or buyers would lose faith in ebay.
With Regards,
prathy_nair
