Magical Chinese Hard Drive

jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"

Comments

I've heard about this

[Tumbleweed]

"Ancient Chinese Secret"

Re:I've heard about this

[harrkev]

Reminds me of the old joke "write only memory." Pretty funny for the hardware types.

Datasheet available HERE..

On a side note, I do now know if this link will be available long-term since TI purchased National Semi.

Re:I've heard about this

[Pseudonym Authority]

So they are the ones responsible for all this "fossil record" propaganda. Ancient China confirmed for agents of the DEVIL!

Infinite harddrive!

[physicsphairy]

I've sent about a terabyte of critically important data to a special compression device my computer came with, called "/dev/null", and it still hasn't filled up.

Re:Infinite harddrive!

[SuperKendall]

I switched to /dev/random after finding it was quite a lot cheaper than feeding and cleaning up after the infinite number of monkeys I used to use.

Shrinkage!

[cfa22]

wow, something alongside a couple of nuts that's smaller than it's supposed to be.

Re:Shrinkage!

[whitedsepdivine]

Or the average male package in china.

Re:It's not a hard drive, it's a data black hole

[Maximum Prophet]

It's called WOM, Write Only Memory, in this case with a small cache to improve performance. (:-)

Re:Cheating

[amicusNYCL]

is an integral part of Chinese business culture and it's not funny.

Sorry, but this is definitely funny. Especially since I'm not affected by it. A lot of things the Chinese do to make money are pretty funny, in fact. It's not like it's a tragedy, if they thought it was tragic they would try to change it. In fact, one of the funniest things about the whole thing is that it is so integral, even the government rips things off. The best part is they act like nothing is going on. That's not Mickey Mouse, it's a cat with round ears! That's not Donald Duck, it's an original Chinese duck character! This is like a bad B-movie plot, but it's actually happening.

WARN not WORM storage

[jurgen]

You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).

:j

Cow-orker bought a brick VCR

[billstewart]

Back in the 80s, one of my cow-orkers bought a VCR "off the back of a truck" in New York. It was really a VCR case with a brick in it.

These days when I've had bricked electronics, it just means that the firmware has gotten too hosed to boot, but this was genuine brick.