
You want a USB stick. There are all these new large sizes and you don’t really care about the speed and the best, but a large one it should be. So EBay is your friend and has so many of those sticks listed. Trouble is, you don’t know what you are getting there. Even small ones in the 1 GB range are sometimes a fake; but of course the main target market now is the 32 GB and 16 GB sticks.
The price is your first give away. If you go to a shop you can get 8 GB sticks for 40 USD or less even. So finding one on EBay for that much and then with 16 GB or more capacity is very unlikely. Also keep in mind the shipping though, some like to ask 1 USD for the stick and 50 USD for shipping. For 16 GB sticks, your prices start past the $50 mark, and 32 GB is usually closer to the hundred. Not saying those are all perfect, but they are more likely to be real than not.
I am not a brands guy, but in this case, brands are usually better. If it says Kingston, Sandisk or Corsair on it, chances are better you get what you want. Those no name sticks have very rarely higher capacities than 2 GB, so a 16 or 32 GB stick is almost guaranteed a fake. And don’t let yourself be blinded by names like “Samsung”. They make chips, but just because they sport that name in the posting, does not mean it is real. In fact that often points to some shady business, if they have to try to get you to buy it by flashing the chip names.
Sellers of this type usually have already a few sales done. Most people don’t know they got scammed. Sometimes they do not ever find out. Check their ratings out first. If they have negative ones, look them up. If they say scam or fake, hands off. Also if they just registered or have only a few sales, this might be a seller of fake USB drives. Having a lot of these items and even “different models” is also a good indicator. Most sellers of fakes only sell these, so if they have no other types of items, this also might be a fake seller.

So, you bought one. Now what? You are not sure if you really have a fake or not. Fear not, the good people from heise.de have actually created a tool that takes care of that called
h2testw. You can grab it from
their site or
just here the direct link. The program is in German and English. Just unpack the zip and start the exe file. In there you can set it to English. Now click the “Select Target” button and select the flash drive you want to test. Make sure you have all data removed from it before doing this though. Make sure that Data volume is set to all available space, then click the Write + Verify button. Now this will take a while. If it truly is 32 GB this could take up to two hours of time, but you can just run it in the background.
After a while you might get an error that it can’t write anymore. Well that is a bad sign, but let it verify. Once it is done with that, it will tell you how much data it could exactly write and verify. Some sticks allow the tool to write the advertised amount, but only verify to its real size.

So why is Windows telling you that it’s 32 GB or 16 GB although H2testw only verifies to 1 GB? That has to do with the internals of a USB stick.
It is made up of two major parts, the memory and the controller. The memory is easy to spot. Just look for the largest chip. They are usually long and narrow and have pretty legible writing on it. The controller on the other hand is smaller and square in most cases. It’s hard to read its writing.
Some fakers tell you it has Samsung chips, but there is no Samsung writing on the chip at all. Often the fakers remove the original printing through various methods and put a new print on it to make it look like it is something different. A part number sometimes appears and if you are familiar with this, you can see that it might be a Samsung one, but again, that is faked. So if there is no part number or a number you get no hits back on Google with, chances are, it’s fake.
The controller is where this whole fake actually gets pulled of. Just slapping those two chips together does not create a USB memory stick. Besides the other parts needed, the controller has a firmware flashed on to it that tells it what the exact chip is that it has available as storage. So now those fakers just take a small stick, say 2 GB and flash on to its controller that it actually has a capacity of 32 GB. Windows reports only back what the controller tells it, since it can’t know exactly how much data there really is available for usage.
So how come not more people realize this?
Customers buy the stick but they only use the first 1 GB of it. Since it has, for example, a real capacity of 2 GB, they won’t notice, since they never use any of the phantom capacity.
There is a lot scarier scenario though. Say your stick only has 2 GB real capacity but you put 4 GB of data on it. In many cases the firmware hack is so complete that windows will copy into oblivion without an error. Of course it only can read back 2 GB of that data, when you read back the rest it’s all random garbage or filled with zeros. You will not notice when you copy the data on to the stick, you will not notice it when you copy the data off the stick. The only place you will notice is when you try to actually use the data. At that point the data will be corrupt and unusable. You might then even attribute that to something else and not the stick.
Data loss happened and most general users will be puzzled as to why.
So now you got a dumb stick. You can get a refund mostly, so you should not be too concerned. Shipping it back is usually not even wanted by the fakers, so now you got a dead stick for free. You know how much space it technically should have according to H2testw. But it would be nice if windows knew it too and you don’t put data on there by accident that goes into nothingness.
Your only chance is to flash it again. For that you need to read the controller chip, the square little one, and search for the tool that is needed to flash it. Usually the first two lines indicate the maker and the model. Enter it in Google and you should find tools ready available online. You have to make sure that it is exactly the right tool for your needs. If the tool is for the chip 1901 and you have 1903 model, it most likely won’t work. Also many are in Chinese which makes it extra hard. In many cases you can rejuvenate your drive to the correct size with that.
Google and forum posts are your friend there. Many users have already encountered the most common controllers and written about it, as well as provided download links.
Look for fake sellers before you buy. After you get the stick, test with H2testw. If it’s fake, demand a full refund (including shipping), immediately. Lastly try to salvage it with a repair flash.
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