In reality, however, the unit contains only a comparatively small 64GB chip. The insidious thing about this manipulation is that the driver has been programmed to appear to recognize successful write operations even when the physical storage has long since been depleted.
External storage devices with huge capacities at bargain prices seem too good to be true, and in many cases, they are. It is better to trust products from brand manufacturers.
Samsung
As soon as the actual capacity is exceeded, the drive starts overwriting the oldest data at the beginning of storage or simply dumps new data packets into a digital black hole, while the file system continues to report an intact structure.
The rude awakening usually doesn’t appear until weeks later, when you try to open your supposedly backed-up photos or vacation documents. Instead of the content, you will only receive error messages or find fragments of corrupt files. We must make this absolutely clear: the operating system is not a reliable indicator of a drive’s integrity.
It simply retrieves the information provided by the data controller. And in this case, the controller has been tampered with. To expose these deceptions, tools are needed that analyze every detail. Therefore, you should check each new drive immediately upon receipt using the Validdrive tool: start the program with administrator rights and select “Check USB Drive”.
Thanks to the Validdrive program, you can quickly determine if the storage device really has the specified storage capacity.
Foundry
Now insert the storage device and allow the program to recognize it. Click ‘Validate THIS drive’ to start the verification. The tool performs a quick and targeted check by writing to random sectors across the declared range and reading them immediately.
As Validdrive measures and analyzes access times during this process, it can determine very quickly if there is actually a physical cell behind a logical address or if the driver is simply suppressing an error message.
