Fake corsair drives as bought on ebay

10th of july 2009

***Update #2***

The costs charged by paypal for adding the funds have also been covered by the seller:
Payment       Transaction costs Received
5,00 GBP     -0,40 GBP                £4,60 GBP
43,50 GBP -1,90 GBP    £41,60 GBP
Refunded                                        £46,20 GBP

Payment sent :
1 jul 2009            -£43,50 GBP

This just proves that 2 parties can solve minor issues like gentlemen, as for anyone else who obtains flashdrives from the internet ALWAYS check them to make sure you are dealing with valid means to store data. If you don't, your data might end up lost. If that is of no importance to you, than maybe - yes, just maybe - you don't even need the additional storage space.

(end of this small report)

10th of july 2009

***Update***

Seller has paid back the money. I just sent out the following message to some of the other buyers, assuming there might be more counterfeit units among them:

"Dear ebay member,

As I tested the units I received and since the seller is still selling these sticks, I feel it is my responsibility to write you regarding a usb stick you bought from saffronspas:

1) the stick I received turned out to be a cheap poor quality counterfeit
2) capacity of the internal chip was hacked to appear as a 16 GB/32 GB unit
(see: home.deds.nl/~counterfeit/)

The images speak for themselves, I highly recommend you to take the following steps:
1) Backup ALL data on the usbstick first if already in use.
2) Verify your backup, if you don't wish to loose the data be sure files are not corrupted.
3) Download h2testw 1.4.
4) Proceed with testing.
5) compare results and images, with the link provided earlier.
6) report the case (link will be listed on the link).

Thanks for reading and take care of yourself ... and your data."

If you bought this stick, or any other model/make, from this seller or someone else and you suspect it to be fake, I highly recommend you to take the steps from above, you can download h2testw 1.4 here: http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/bo/downloads/h2testw_1.4.zip

Another useful link: http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/

I also left feedback as requested by the seller, however for counterfeit transactions I can and will not leave positive feedback, I left one negative and one neutral feedback based on the information on this page.

we resolved the issue as gentlemen, neg. FB is based on item authencity	Koper: kapteinigloo ( 105)	10-jul-09 09:45
16GB USB Memory Flash Drive Pen Stick, Corsair. UK. (nummer 220442666785)	GBP 11,51	Object bekijken
counterfeit see: home.deds.nl/~counterfeit/ but we resolved this thnx!	Koper: kapteinigloo ( 105)	10-jul-09 09:41
32GB USB Memory Flash Drive Pen Stick, Corsair. UK. (nummer 220442666023)	GBP 25,00	Object bekijken

8th of july 2009

Received two genuine ~~Corsair~~ counterfeit ~~16 & 32 GB~~hacked USBsticks.

After opening the blister packaging, I first plugged in the 16 GB drive and ran h2testw 1.4, a testing utility which basically writes data to the usb stick and than verifies the data. Test results are as below:

-
H2testw 1.4 results on “Corsair 16 GB”:

The media is likely to be defective.
235.0 MByte OK (481416 sectors)
15.3 GByte DATA LOST (32253816 sectors)
Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
15.3 GByte corrupted (32253816 sectors)
0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x000000000eb10000
Expected: 0x000000000eb10000
Found: 0x00000000e6cb0000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 1.29 MByte/s
Reading speed: 3.52 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
-

These results are very suspicious. When we assume that this new drive is not faulty, than something else is wrong. 235 megs were "OK" and passed verification. This raises the suspicion that the real memory on board is not 16 Gigabyte but a mere 256 megabyte of ram.

Secondly the unit differs from the original and is not rugged at all.
The blue led indicator is missing. Below are some pictures to proof my point.

that's paint on my nail