all started this Christmas, when I decided autoregalarme a music player (mp3). Especially since I am not a music lover and my budget was rather limited, as I searched on eBay and apparently you can buy directly from China mp3 players type / mp4 prices unthinkable in Spain.
About two weeks after making my purchase, I find the announcement post, and as I have time I will get my new player.
This case, it is a bad copy of Apple's iPod. I was not surprised the poor quality of the finishes, or the zero resemblance between the original Apple software and is simple copy. These were things we already had. Yes it surprised me, however the fact that the device was almost impossible to use: After hours of loading, had autonomy for a few minutes. This made me start looking at forums on any complaints regarding this product, and that was when I learned, incidentally, the existence of a large-scale scam consisting sell all kinds of flash-based devices (USB drives, memory cards, mp3 players / mp4, etc) totally fraudulent.
fraud is to modify the memory controller for the system capacity report absolutely unreal. In my case, my device has a 2GB memory module but sold as 8GB device. The operating system detects it as 8GB and fraud is impossible to detect until the moment the user to record more than 2GB and tries to access the recorded data.
Looking for a little more, I find that many users have experienced this same problem and have created websites to try to curb this type of fraud SOSFakeFlash , FakeFlashNews , TechChips , FlashDriveFacts , FlashFakeCentral , and there are sites (eg FixFakeFlash ) in which they are instructed to try to "fix" these devices and at least try to use their real capacity memory.
As a note, indicating that a recent report (December 2009), Spain is in fourth place (and first non-Anglophone) the number of victims of such fraud.
What can we do if we bought a flash drive? I know that many people have bought music players and / or video, memory cards for their cameras or mobile phones or simply USB drives. Right now, the best tool to get rid of doubts regarding the real capacity of the device appears to be:
h2testw program (download here ) seems to be the tool recommended in all sites. The program is in German and English, and the page only in German but with some online translator can understand enough.
In my case, after applying the program to my music player, I found the following:
Warning: Only 7438 of 7519 MByte tested.
The half is likely to Be defective.
1.6 GByte OK (3523960 sectors)
5.5 GByte DATA LOST (11709064 sectors) Details
: 5.3 GByte overwritten (11297406 sectors) 0 KByte
Slightly changed (201.0 MByte < 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
corrupted (411658 sectors)
32 KByte aliased memory (64 sectors) First error at offset
: Expected
0x0000000000000000: 0x0000000000000000
Found: 0x00011a4543425355
H2testw
version 1.3 Writing speed: 10.9 MByte / s
Reading speed: 12.7 MByte / s
v1.4 H2testw
In short: In the cases 8GB device, something less than 2GB were being usable.
The program, very cautious of the assumption that innocence and says that the memory may be faulty. After seeing these results, I decided to open the device and this is what I found: We
see the sticker indicating that the device is supposed to 8GB, and indeed this is how the memory controller notifies the operating system. The surprise is inside:
The flash memory chip is a Hynix H27UAG8T2ATR. Searching the Internet, it turns out to be a 16Gbit module, ie 2GB of flash memory. Obviously this is a fraud. The system has been manipulated to report that has more memory (in this case, 8GB).
0 comments:
Post a Comment