Analysis of a Fake 80GB USB Drive

Recently my friend’s room mate got hold of a “Transcend 80GB USB Drive” .He is the same friend who found the fake 64GB USB Drive.He instantly knew it was fake because nobody manufactures 80GB USB Drives.The capacity of any USB Drive is only in powers of two.So you can have 2 or 4 or 16 or 32 or 64 GB USB Drives.

This fake USB Drive looks exactly like a Transcend USB Drive except for the 80GB Capacity.If the manufacturer of this pendrive had some brains,he would have sold this fake USB Drive as a 8 or 16GB USB Drive instead of 80GB.

Description of the Fake 80GB Pendrive

It is Pink/Black in colour and has the model number JF V30.

I checked the properties of the USB Drive in Windows Explorer.The capacity was 79.9GB.

The next step was to find out the actual capacity of the USB Drive.According to RMPrepUSB the capacity of this USB Drive is only 5mb!

Then I tried to find the VID and PID using ChipGenius.Amazingly ChipGenius drew a blank.It could not identify the micro-controller used by the USB Drive.

Most Fake USB Drives have atleast 256mb of usable memory.This usable memory is generally regained by reflashing the micro-controller.However, when I opened this USB Drive with a screw driver and I was shocked to find that the USB Drive did not even have a memory chip.So there was no question of reflashing the micro-controller.

Here is a screenshot comparison of the fake USB Drive with a Genuine Transcend 2GB VF 30 USB Drive.

FAKE vs GENUINE

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