512GB memory keys! Only $35!

Beware the Ebay scammers and their dodgy, half-arsed USB sticks.

China is a genius factory, don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. The latest tech gimmick to flood the market are some naughty USB keys containing a hacked controller and only half as much physical flash memory as they claim.

A lot of these cheap keys find their way to Ebay, advertised with a large capacity – usually between 1 and 8GB. When you plug it in, your OS will report the full capacity, however half of that doesn’t exist. Filling the key more than halfway writes to its imaginary memory and throws that data into a black hole. During normal use, the hack is a bugger to detect and will no doubt turn your day into a bed-wetting nightmare when crucial files are lost in the void.

While a similar trick has been around before, where 16MB was being exaggerated to multiple gigabytes, the problem this time is quantity: hundreds of these things get sold a day to Australians alone. Ebay is so saturated with these things and you have to search hard to find the genuine article.

The hack works by tricking the controller into believing it has a larger memory chip attached than it actually does. If you open up a key, you will find two main chips soldered on: the flash memory (the large rectangular IC) and the controller (the smaller square IC). This exploit seems to be isolated to keys with an iCreate controller. However, without disassembling the key, there is no way to know what you will get. Pictured below is a dicey iCreatei5127-lg based stick, but there may be others out there.



For now there are some simple ways to test if you‘ve been duped. The quick way is to get your hands on a copy of HD-Tach (the trial version is fine), and run a benchmark on your key. If there is a sudden spike or dip , like the one in the image below, you might have purchased from wallet-rape central. If it stays flat you’re probably in the clear.



The more thorough test involves filling your key and seeing if anything falls into the void. We suggest taking as many mp3s or similar as you can fit on the key and splitting them up into a few folders (8 is a good number; try and have folders of equal size). Copy them all to the key and unplug when done. At least a minute after unplugging the key, insert it into a different computer and test a few files from each of your folders. On a bad key, about half of these will be corrupted.

If you’re one of the poor sods who have one of these dodgy drives, all is not lost. First you should try and raise a dispute through the appropriate channels. Ebay in particular has facilities for this.

If you’re stuck with it, however, you can cut your losses and reformat it to the correct size. iCreate provide a tool called iFormat. We had a little trouble with this version, but there is an older (more stable) version available, which will correctly detect how much flash you have and repartition. As your drive shrinks, the pangs of buyers’ remorse may kick in, however the danger of losing files is now gone.

If you’re about to buy flash storage from Ebay, be very careful – and remember that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.



The example is just one that we’ve noticed -- there are probably many others out there. If you are key hunting on Ebay, remember to use everything at your disposal. There are some good fraud-detection guides out there, and it always helps to double check seller feedback and use Paypal. Sudden up-crops of negative or neutral feedback in the last month are big warning signs. Spend the time to find out what those bad ones were about. Make sure you do your research and don’t buy impulsively if you’re in a hurry or you’re looking at a sale that ends soon – just like Dell specials, there will be another similar sale almost immediately afterwards.

Good Huntin’.