Another Scam Alert
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
I recently read about another tech scam involving Solid State Disk drives. I have written articles that discussed Solid State Disk (SSDs) drives vs. regular Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). HDDs are the standard mechanical disk drives that have been used in PCs for the last 40 years. SSDs are the newer solid-state drives that do not have moving parts.
SSDs are quite expensive and do not have as much storage capacity as an HDD. It is pretty common to see desktops and laptops offering 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of HDD storage. PCs with SSDs are usually 256 gigabytes (GB) or 512 gigabytes. The PCs with 512 gigabytes are usually quite a bit more expensive than those with 256GB.
Imagine the surprise an electrical engineer got when he saw a 30-terabyte SSD being sold on a large retailer's online website for only a couple of hundred dollars!
He was so surprised (and skeptical) that he ordered one and took it apart when he received it. He found that instead of a real SSD the device had 2 small storage capacity memory cards (like the ones you could buy for a digital camera) that were modified to report a 30 terabyte capacity instead of their real capacity.
The fake SSD was only available online; it was not available at the store. Like Amazon, the retail store allows 3rd party vendors to sell their products on their website. When the engineer notified the retail store that the 3rd party vendor was selling a fake product, the store immediately took the device off its website.
If you see a large SSD being sold on any online site be very careful! Do not fall for this scam. Do the research to verify the product, and don’t just look at product reviews – they can easily be faked as can the product.
Remember, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true!
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PhotoCredit: Ars Technica
Image 1 Caption: Fake SSD showing two memory cards pretending to be high capacity storage devices. Photo courtesy ARS Technica.
