Beware of External HDD Scams!
Every single category of technology products has both the real products and fake counterfeit ones. Fake products are usually found at either unauthorized retail stores, unauthorized distributors, or unaffiliated sellers across platforms like Amazon and eBay. Those counterfeit products don’t meet quality requirements that a real product would offer.
One of the examples that we’re going to cover in this article is external hard drives. When you buy an external hard drive from authorized sellers or from the company directly, you are getting a real product that meets all requirements. Go cheap, and you’ll start seeing fake products that are too good to be true. Those usually go in the following categories:
- External hard drives that have very high capacity at unbelievably cheap prices.
- External hard drives that look like the real one when it’s an obvious counterfeit.
- External hard drives that have their internals dismantled and repurposed to fit in cheap “memory sticks.”
- External hard drives that actually have capacities and read/write speeds slower than advertised.
For example, there is an increasing number of counterfeiters that try hard to replicate the real thing, such as copying the logo cleverly, figuring out the exact materials used, and copying the print materials in the product boxes to try to match the real ones. Additionally, scammers try to “artifically” increase the weight of the product to match the real weight found in real products by finding ways to accomplish this goal, such as putting a heavy metal inside the product.
External hard drives are no exception, since a Reddit user had an incident where they were encountering an increasing number of fake external hard drives. This was on a post, which has since been deleted, but the image of the fake external hard drive internals has been saved.
Opening this specific hard drive revealed the following components:
- Cheap memory stick connected to the USB female port connector
- USB female port connector connected to another USB female port connector with the PCB using four cables
- A heavy metal to “increase the weight”
- A glue around the USB female port connector and the memory stick to “make everything stick”
This gives users a false impression that they’ve got a sizable speedy hard drive, when they really got a cheap memory stick with capacities and speeds less than advertised.
When buying products, you need to buy them only from trusted stores (Newegg, Best Buy, etc.) or from the official website of a product directly. This makes sure that you get warranty support, should you experience failures with a genuine product.
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