Every year, the cost of storage medium drops, but the manufacturers keep their price-points the same, by offering up more for the same money. Sounds fair, right? Well, there are a few crafty salesmen out there that have figured out a way to give you less for more.
In China, some clever salesmen have figured out how to create what some would call a magic hard drive. From the outside it looks like an official Samsung portable drive with all the right labels. The salesman will even show you the storage capacity of 500GB and copy a large file to it. What more convincing do you need before a sale at an unbelievably low price? Hand over your money to the smiling salesman, and head on home with your shiny new hard drive.
It seems to accept all your file copies without issue, but when you try to access them, that's when you notice something's gone awry. That HD movie you put on there only plays for 5 minutes before looping back to the start. What the --?! So you wipe the file, and load it again. Same thing.
This is apparently a scenario that's becoming more and more common in certain area of China, particularly close to the Russian boarder. So how does this "magic" hard drive work? A Russian repair shop has figured it out. Soak it in.
Do your eyes deceive you? No, that really is a simple 128 MB flash drive glued to the inside of an external case with some weights inside to make it feel right in your hand. The real clever bit is tricking any computer it connects to over USB into thinking the drive is much larger than it is. A nice bit of programming and modification performed to the controller in the drive, and voila! A 128 MB flash drive that thinks it's a 500 GB hard drive. Talk about delusions of grandeur.
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