What do you think are the chances that one of
your USB flash drives is fake? Because there's a whole bunch of fake drives out there that
may say there's one terabyte of storage on it or two terabytes. And when you actually
plug in the drive, it may even say that. But that drive is actually programmed at the
firmware level to lie to the operating system. And in reality, it might
only have 64 gigabytes. Well, there's actually a new cool tool I found
that makes it pretty easy to check this, and will literally tell you how much real space
versus fake space may be on any flash drives. So I went on Amazon and bought a blatantly fake flash
drive that claims to have one terabyte of storage, but of course it's not going to have anywhere
near that, to use as a demonstration. But I want to point out that these fake storage flash drives
are worse than they may seem on the surface. For example, you might think, well once you fill
it up with 64 gigabytes of the real storage, that it'll just say it's full and you
won't be able to add anything else. Well no, actually, the operating system will
keep writing to it. And it'll actually add the information about the file to the
map (you can think of it like) on the beginning of the drive. So it will
look like those files are copied and still on the drive. But really, they
went into a proverbial black hole. They went nowhere. So you won't realize that
until you try to go retrieve those files and copy off it. So you won't even know
that those files are gone already. Okay, now enough delays. The software I'm going to be
talking about is called Validrive, and it's by Gibson Research or Steve Gibson. He also created
some software called Spinrite and some others. And how this software works is it
basically writes random data across the entire supposed storage of the drive
and then reads it back. And if it matches, then it means that storage is real. Or if it reads
it back and it's different or nothing comes back, then that part of the drive is fake and it'll
tell you what parts did end up being real. And what's nice about this one specifically,
instead of other tools I've seen that seem to do the same thing, is that this one doesn't require
you to fill up the whole drive. It just writes to a distribution across the storage. So you don't
have to test literally every single part of it. So why don't we go over testing the software
and show you how it works with this fake drive. As you can see, this drive supposedly says
it's two terabytes in size and it's exFAT formatted. There's nothing on it at the
moment. And when you launch the software, it shows a bunch of information. And it does
mention that you don't actually have to erase the drive to use the Validrive software, which again
is also different from other tools I've seen. And apparently that's because the software, if it
does test a region that already has data on there, it'll restore it. So if you do have
any critical information on there, you might want to be better safe
than sorry and just copy it off first. But theoretically you could
use it with stuff still on there. Anyway, what you do is click check USB
drive. And here, this part is kind of clunky. Instead of just choosing the drive,
you have to either insert it at this point, or if the drive's already inserted, you have
to unplug it and then plug it back in. Not sure why that is. There might be a reason to
it. Anyway, once you plug it in, it'll show that it detected the drive and show the supposed
declared size, or what the drive claims is on it. And also a drive letter, if there is
one. Then you can hit "Validate This Drive" and it'll do some kind of calibration
at first. And then you'll see that hopefully it will quickly go through and just start
writing to various parts. And this one, for some reason, slowed down at one
point very much and then sped up again. I don't know, that seems to happen randomly for
some drives. But you can see that a majority of this device is indeed fake and only the beginning
is real. And you could also apparently choose a monochrome view if you want for some reason,
but that's there too. After you hit Close, it will show this report window thing and a
bunch of info like the declared size again, and also the validated actual drive size and
show the same thing with the colors again. And if you scroll down even further, it'll
show some performance data too. Though I'm not sure what units these are like bits or
bytes. One thing I really wish is that you could resize this window so that you
could take a screenshot of the report info at the top and the full colored
table. That would be just kind of nice for taking a screenshot to share, but
I guess this is still an early version. You can export the report as a RTF
or rich text format or regular text file though. I ran the tool on a bunch of
USB drives that I have, and fortunately, it doesn't seem like any of them are fake.
I will point out that some of them seem to start out fast and then again, slow down,
seemingly freeze, but just go very slow. Some of them are fast from start to end, like
particularly, it seems like USB 3 ones are very fast. I don't know what the difference is,
but just be aware of that. You might have to be patient with a couple of them. One thing I would
note is if the drive is like fake and fraudulent, you're probably going to see all the real data
at the front and then everything fake after it. But if you happen to see, I don't know,
maybe everything's real except random red spots throughout, that probably is
just either like low quality memory or some bad sectors or something like that.
That might be just damage to the drive, and I probably wouldn't use that if that was the
case, but I haven't seen that in my case at all. But anyway yeah, pretty simple video today. Just
wanted to show you this. I'll put the link in the description if you want to check it out.
Let me know down in the comments if you have any drives that you realize, "Oh no, they're
actually fake." If you did enjoy this video, definitely give it a big giant
thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm. And if you want to subscribe, I try
to make videos about twice a week, usually Wednesday and Saturday.
And if you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I
was talking about some special Windows folders that you probably didn't know about, or
maybe didn't realize some cool uses for them. I'll put that link right there. So thanks so much
for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
