Sometimes things are too good to be true

My friend’s father got scammed. He purchased an external SSD from some unknown website for some absurdly low price. It was a supposedly a 16TB external SSD. Now, I’ve been around the block a few times, I was immediately suspicious when I was handed a red brick smaller than my cellphone and told it would hold 16 Terabytes of data. I told my friend: “I’ll investigate this, but I wanna temper your expectations, this is almost guaranteed to be a counterfeit” and I explained why it was. First and foremost: Nobody is out here using SSDs for cold storage of that magnitude. If you’ve got 16TB of storage, you’re almost definitely using HDDs, partly because that much solid state storage would cost an arm and a leg, and partly because SSDs are super volatile when not left plugged in or regularly ‘re-charged’ (not quite the right term, re-energized maybe? idk, not the point). HDDs, as long as they’re not kept near something which imparts intense magnetic flux, will last pretty much forever (or until their lubricant decides it would prefer to be a solid, which can be solved). For example, I’m still using HDDs from over 20 years ago. Are they expected to fail any time soon? Hell if I know but they still pass SMART with flying colors.

So I told her I’d take the drive and try to put her data on it (I’ve been assisting her with backing up her optical media and I’m gonna teach her to roll out a Jellyfin server, she doesn’t own any optical media players anymore). I plug in the drive and try to format it to ext4, and immediately my pc started throwing I/O errors. As expected, the drive is not what it claims to be. I break the bad news and she says to bin it. I don’t like binning electronics, e-waste is my favorite toy, so instead I ripped the thing apart.

The bastards laser-ed off the information for the memory controller. It was an tf-card adapter set to report 16TB, in reality, the TF-Card holds 63-ish GB (about 63 billion bytes). I’m zeroing it out right now (it was raw, who knows what data could actually be there if I were to ddrescue it) and formatting it ext4. Maybe it will make a good card for holding roms. I think she’s got one of those mini-psOnes laying around, there’s gotta be a way to jailbreak it to accept games off an SD and she’s got a big psx collection laying around (those are all rotten and need to be resurfaced, but that’s a different post, y’all please keep your discs in a climate controlled environment. COOL and DRY with NO UV EXPOSURE)

Now, on to why I’m so surprised this happened:

I said her father bought the SSD. He’s an older gentlemen, former C89 dev, worked on COBOL, did a lot of Punchcard development back in the day. I wouldn’t have been surprised if not for that last point (software guys don’t understand hardware so good in my experience). This is a man who is painfully aware that a kilobyte of storage once took up an entire room entangled with woven magnetic cores. How did he see the device, understand the scale of the data it claimed to store, and not think for even a moment “There’s no way this is real”? I’m trying not to judge, but what the hell my guy? 15 Trillion bytes for less than $500 on a flash device? Out of your goddamned mind, couldn’t possibly be true. My 8TB HDD (magnetic platters, the old tech) was almost $200 a year ago, it’s over $300 today. For perspective: Tom’s Hardware has an article from a few months ago showing that a 16TB flash device is over $10,000. That’s the price of 4 used cars. FOUR!

Anyway, I think if this goes any longer I’m gonna get bitchy about the state of solid state storage in 2026.

Signing off,
Nora