NTFS Errors on Drive

[rjbinney]

I recently bought a 2TB flash drive (which is unbelievable, but that's beside the point) to use as a Music Library. I currently have an external drive plugged into my router, but the physical space is more conducive for a stick.

My router doesn't support exFatso I reformatted the stick from ExFat to NTFS. The backup SAID it went OK, but then a number of the files weren't accessible. The "Scan/Repair" drive wouldn't work, it gave me some weird error, so I tossed the stick and got a new one.

Just backed it all up again on to the new stick. Everything copied fine - so it said. But then when I plugged the stick in, it wouldn't read. So I plugged it into my PC and got the "Errors with this drive - would you like to scan and repair" and I would so I did and it came back with "Windows was unable to repair the drive".

So my question is - am I screwing something up by reformatting it as NTFS?

[DaveLembke]

Is this plugged into a USB 3.0 jack instead of 2.0 as well as are you properly dismounting the drive from system by telling it that you want to remove it or are you just pulling it out with improper dismount where corruption can occur?  Reason for the USB 3.0 vs 2.0 question is that the 3.0 is a faster method of communication and the dismount of the value would be faster on a USB 3.0 port especially since its 2TB which is Huge when it comes to a slow flash drive.

With the 2TB in a USB connection I would have gone with a USB 2TB SSD drive for better performance, but maybe the lag of a USB stick isnt that bad. My larger USB sticks 256GB in size are quite laggy compared to my Samsung Portable 250GB SSD drive.

[BC_Programmer]

I recently bought a 2TB flash drive (which is unbelievable, but that's beside the point)

Perhaps not quite so beside the point as you think, since this actually tells us exactly what your issue is.


Thing is- There are no 2TB Flash Drives. The largest available flash drives are 1TB, and they cost over $200. I have to assume that you paid significantly less than that. (I certainly hope you did, anyway!)

What you bought was a fake drive. Typically they are made by having a microcontroller that thinks it has a larger memory chip and then just putting a smaller one in.  It happily writes data beyond the real "end" which usually just wraps around to the start of the drive.

[DaveLembke]

I was thinking same thing as you BC until I looked them up on amazon and found them. Not to say that his isnt a fake drive, but they seem to exist on amazon and lots of positive reviews.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2tb+usb+flash+drive&crid=13YHGFQOHX5CT&sprefix=2tb+usb%2Caps%2C254&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_4_7

[BC_Programmer]

I saw those. They are fake. Open up any of those and scroll down and look at the reviews.

You'll notice there's a lot of 1 star reviews. And the positive reviews all, for some reason, seem to be reviewing a phone case.

These sellers will create a listing for a "good" product (in the case of this one, for example, a phone case) then they will add a new product to the same listing for the fake drive, and remove the old one. The reviews for the previous product stay attached and people get fooled into thinking it has a lot of good reviews- It does, but those reviews aren't for the product you are able to buy in the listing.

If you look up 1TB Drives, you'll see a lot of the same ones listed here for around 20-30 dollars, interspersed with 1TB Flash drives from brands like SanDisk and PNY that are $150 or more.

And you see the same thing with fake 1TB Drives. like This one. When you scroll down to the reviews, the "5 star" ones are pretty much all for a screen protector.

It's not just flash drives either. Pretty much any memory item. Fake SD Cards, even fake Memory cards for game consoles like the Gamecube and PS2.

Pretty sure they are all made using salvaged chips from old e-waste. I have a bunch of cheap Gamecube memory cards for example which I imaged using Gamecube homebrew software, and the memory chips had remnants of a Linux file-system and even images which allowed me to see that the memory chip was salvaged from a decommissioned South Korean ISP's router.

[rjbinney]

Hm. Well I have it plugged into an Anker 3.0 Hub (that I think BC Programmer reco'ed a ways back)... But I haven't even had the pleasure to yank it out and plug it back in - the "Verify" step in the backup program is what gave me the first indication that it was screwy.

I ran the backup/clone process overnight - it looked good, but created an empty directory. So now I'm wondering if you're not onto something with the "fake innards". Yes I bought it off Amazon, so at least I can return it. But how does that even work - how does it make the PC think there's more there than is there?

And how can I verify that? (Or at least figure out how much "good" space I have?)

Weird interesting stuff. I just figured memory had gotten really effin' cheap.

[BC_Programmer]

But how does that even work - how does it make the PC think there's more there than is there?

They use a Memory controller, configure it to think it has 2TB of memory space to work with, and then just put in a much smaller memory chip.

The Memory controller controls the actual USB Interfacing so it communicates with the PC as if it was indeed that capacity.

Read-Writes beyond the end of the "real" storage wrap around, resulting in the signature corruption.

here is an article which overviews some software that can be used to test for counterfeit drives and determine the real capacity.

[rjbinney]

Thanks for that article. I already have moved a bunch of stuff (successfully I think) to the new drive, so I will try the Russian test first.

(It's not that I don't have multiple copies, but if I can keep what I've done, that would make me somewhat happy).

[rjbinney]

The Russian test didn't even recognize a brand or serial number on the drive.

I tried Fake Flash Test - and besides the fact that it doesn't understand fractions, it crashed both times at 30% on the "Reading back marker block" test. So I presume that's a bad sign.

[BC_Programmer]

Yes, I'd guess it is 8GB or possibly 16GB in terms of real storage. Could be as low as 2GB.

There are of course other tools which may have varying success- I think some of them can tell you the real size and even reconfigure the device so that it properly appears with that correct size.

[rjbinney]

And you wonder why I have trust issues.