Apr 7, 2011 11:17 GMT  ·  By

It looks like people are using their inventiveness in all possible ways these days, as a very unfortunate customer learned, not long ago, when he discovered that his 500 GB HDD was really just a box with little besides a couple of bolt nuts glued to the inside.

Forgeries aren't really that big a news, even though authorities do their best to shield the general populace from them.

On the IT market, there are certain, very queer circumstances that can cause both outrage and hilarity by their very nature.

One such situation arose not long ago, when a certain end-users was faced with the stark reality of just how risky it was to buy an HDD (or any other piece of HDD for that matter) from a Chinese store.

This is not to say that Chinese merchandise is automatically bad. After all, many of the components on sale around the world are made in Chinese facilities.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the folks over at the service center that examined a certain product had been faced with rip-offs before.

The most recent unlucky customer had bought a 500 GB Samsung (supposedly) USB hard drive for what is described as a very low price (to put it mildly).

At first glance, one might not see anything wrong, since capacity and file sizes were correctly relayed to the OS. This is made even stranger by the fact that tech labels and the like were not in short supply, and the salesman supposedly even saved something on it to prove the authenticity.

Nevertheless, it did not work properly. A film copied onto the non-HDD, for instance, only allowed for the viewing of its last 5 minutes.

The personnel at the service center dismantled the 'HDD' to reveal that it was just an empty frame with a pair of bolt nuts (for weight no doubt) and a flash drive of 128MB.

And here comes the strange part. Whatever the Chinese did, it allows said drive to work in a 'looped' mode that, when copying a file, constantly erases previously copied data while not touching other files on the drive.

Whether or not the method for this is discovered, the fact remains that customers should be careful what and from where they buy.

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Fake HDD causes outrage and hilarity
Fake HDD causes outrage and hilarity
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