The saga of fake eBay and Amazon products continues. This latest instalment was supposedly a 1TB USB External Hard drive that had failed. The client didn’t suspect anything unusual about the drive until it failed, so sent it to us for diagnosis. When we removed the drive from the generic external case, we found a drive with an extra plain label over the usual manufacturers label. This is not unheard of, but is unusual, and made us a bit suspicious. We peeled back the plain label, and underneath was a 120GB hard drive, that looks like it was pulled from an old HP laptop.
Upon connecting the drive to our diagnostic kit, the drive had a problem in the firmware area and couldn’t reach a ready state. In other words, the data was not accessible. After a lot of head scratching and tweaking around with the firmware, we found the fault and got the drive into a ready state. That’s when we noticed the model number didn’t match the label. Also the hard drive was identifying itself as 1TB, even though we know it was only 120GB.
| Real | Fake | |
| Model | ST9120822AS | ST1000LM024 |
| Capacity | 120GB | 1TB |
There were a few bad sectors during the image process, but that’s not surprising when you consider it had possibly been in use since around 2007. All customer data was successfully recovered.
As usual, our current advice when buying storage drives online these days is as follows: Go for brands you know. Check you’re not getting too-good of a deal. If possible, fully test the device using a manufacturer’s tools before you trust your data on it. Most manufacturers provide free tools to test their own drives.
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