This little program was used by a conniving programmer to determine the actual capacity of any USB flash drive
Particularly when it comes to online purchases, what appears to be a good deal at first glance can actually be a well-planned scam. The topic of discussion today is the advent of USB storage drives with large capacities at remarkably low costs.
Fortunately, users now have tools like ValiDrive at their disposal to quickly identify these kinds of scams, thanks to the initiative of experts like Steve Gibson.
It is now very difficult to buy storage devices like USB flash drives, SSDs, or SD cards on websites like Amazon, Temu, or AliExpress because many of the products that are offered to us "sell" incredible features, like 2 TB of storage, at absurdly low prices.
Frequently, these assurances are deceptive and expire as soon as we connect the storage drive to our computer. But occasionally, the scam is so cleverly constructed that the operating system shows the seller's promised capacity when the device is connected.
However, a large portion of this purported space is not really on the device, which can eventually result in data loss and a deceptive sense of security that vanishes as soon as we begin saving files.
Veteran programmer and computer security specialist Steve Gibson made the decision to act after personally witnessing the scope of the issue: Gibson bought 12 USB flash drives of unidentified brands from Amazon in September 2023.
After examining it, he found that it was all a hoax: most of it only provided 62GB of the purported 2TB storage capacity, even though Windows reported the advertised capacity.
Gibson was inspired by this discovery to develop ValiDrive, a small, cost-free, and efficient tool for identifying phony USB drives before users suffer serious losses.
You can download ValiDrive for free. It is a straightforward and practical program that is small (less than 100KB) and portable (no installation needed):
ValiDrive conducts the test safely and without jeopardizing pre-existing data, in contrast to other, more intrusive techniques.
Despite being a new tool, ValiDrive is comparable to other programs like H2testw, which is also free and was made popular by Heise. However, ValiDrive's user-friendly visual interface makes it stand out for its speed, portability, and simplicity of use.
- ValiDrive link