Psst! Wanna buy a cheap thumbdrive?

If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.    

On a recent trip overseas, a friend bought a 500GB USB thumb drive for only AU$20! That’s only 4c per gigabyte – bargain!

Could that “500G” just be the model number? Nope, definitely 500 gigs, it says so on the back:

Even Vista says it has half a terabyte!

When he tried copying files across to it, it started to report I/O errors after around 200 megabytes (surprise surprise). A deep format revealed that it was in fact really only a 256MB thumb drive.

Given that:

1. There is no 500GB thumb drive on Sony’s official site;
2. 32GB is the highest capacity thumb drive available in Australia;
3. The ridiculously low dollar-to-gigabyte ratio; and
4. It doesn’t actually work;

this is very obviously a fake. What’s interesting is that they’ve hacked the firmware to report a higher capacity than the drive actually is. Fake or not, that’s pretty clever.

Now if my friend had a web-enabled phone, he could have done a quick search on the net and found that these were most likely fakes.  In fact, he could have bought a  3G iPhone for only AU$100 from another vendor down the street … 🙂