Uncovering the Truth Behind Counterfeit Storage Devices
It’s not just on dubious trading platforms such as Temu that counterfeit storage devices can be found. Even reputable online marketplaces like Amazon can be infiltrated by unscrupulous dealers who advertise SSDs with large storage capacities as supposed bargains. These counterfeit products often originate from external service providers who offer their fake goods via Amazon’s “Warehouse” deals, which are meant for returned or used items.
The quality of these counterfeit drives varies greatly, ranging from cheap fakes to professional counterfeits that can be difficult to distinguish from genuine products at first glance. In some cases, genuine flash memory media are simply given a different sticker with fake product specifications, while in other cases, completely counterfeit circuit boards with fraudulent controllers are used. This scam can also be found on external drives with a USB connection, where the controller tricks the operating system into believing a false drive size, simulates write operations, but only actually stores a fraction of the data.
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F3: A Tool to Check for Flash Drives
Fortunately, there is a way to detect counterfeit or defective flash drives using Linux tools. The F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) tool can scrutinize flash drives of all kinds and detect subtle errors caused by normal aging processes. F3 is not fooled by manipulated controller chips but empirically determines the real capacity of a drive as well as its read and write speeds. It can also check the integrity of written data by writing and reading the entire space to identify old, unreliable flash memory.
F3 is a collection of command-line tools that is present in the repositories of most Linux distributions. It can be installed in the terminal with the command sudo apt install f3. For flash drives such as SD cards, USB sticks, external drives with flash media, but also for internal NVMe SSDs, the program f3probe is the most suitable tool in this collection of tools. It immediately determines the real capacity of a drive and is not fooled by controller chips.
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An initial test with f3probe is non-destructive, meaning it keeps the contents of a drive intact. The tool requires root authorization or a prefixed sudo, as well as the device ID of the drive, which can be obtained with the command lsblk -d. The command to start the non-destructive drive test is sudo f3probe /dev/sdd, replacing /dev/sdd with the actual device ID.
Also for HDDs: A Thorough Test
While f3probe compares the information from the controller with the memory addresses actually available on the data carrier, the F3 tools f3write and f3read take a more universal approach. These tools work at the file system level, regardless of the type of disc being tested, and require partitions that are already mounted and writable.
f3write writes files with checksums to a mounted medium until it is completely written, and f3read then verifies this data. This check only uses the free, remaining space on a drive and is therefore not destructive. For example, if a drive to be tested is mounted under /media/user/5EBD-5C80/, then f3write /media/user/5EBD-5C80/ executes the write process, and f3read /media/user/5EBD-5C80/ verifies the checksums of the written files.
NAS Hard Drives: The Recording Technology is Crucial
Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices require hard drives that can withstand continuous operation. While conventional SATA hard drives for desktop PCs are not designed for such use, hard drive manufacturers offer drives specifically labeled as “NAS” for these application scenarios. However, even these drives may not be suitable for a RAID network or the ZFS file system if they use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology.
SMR is a recording technique that maximizes storage density by overlapping tracks on a platter, but it requires several passes before a data record is reliably written and read. This approach is unsuitable for RAID, which performs a checksum comparison of written data blocks, and can lead to errors and long waiting times. Only hard disks that use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) with linear tracks are suitable for hard disks in a RAID network.
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A list of suitable CMR hard drives can be found at m6u.de/cmr, a NAS service provider that collects user information to help others make informed purchasing decisions.
