FAKE 4TB USB External Drive
I bought a 4TB small external drive, advertised as having USB 3.0 lightning fast speed for external storage. Price was around $70, I had seen a similar device on Amazon for more than twice the price, so I bought it to try it out for storing movies. It arrived in about 2 weeks (slow) but it came from China, based on the tracking. I immediately tested it, windows reported it had 4TB and I did format it again. The I tried copying a couple of movies, about 2 to 3GB of data. The transfer speed was about 15MB/s, certainly not lightning fast, it was about one third of USB 2.0 speed, no better than an SD memory card. It kept going, but half way through it stopped and the laptop disconnected the USB drive reporting a failure to connect. Tried again and the same result. I then tried the H2testw program for verifying real capacity on a USB memory device. I just set it to test 100GB to start. The test failed after writing only 2.3GB of data, reporting a faulty or fake device.
I reported my issues with the customer support, they referred me to a person that wanted me to check the cable, my laptop, format and try again, try another cable and laptop, everything but a possible fault with their device.
I asked for the return and refund process, but never did get an answer. After a few days of no help, I sent a full report with photos to Paypal and they immediately refunded my payment.
Being an engineer I decided to open up the drive and sure enough it has a small pcb with a TF microSD card inserted. I put the TF card into a standard reader and it reported only 50GB of space, about 1.25% of 4TB. I suspect the small board spoofs the USB interface to make the connected device believe it has 4TB capacity - it is a FAKE device. with fake internal components - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY
Note: I tested the microSD card (which windows showed has 50GB) with H2testw and it only has 1.5GB of actual memory, Just 0.0375% of the promised 4TB - this must be illegal - it is fraud.
November 14, 2025
Unprompted review