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Magical Chinese Hard Drive

Posted by Soulskill on from the finally-a-use-for-old-flash-drives dept.

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!"

8 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. I've heard about this by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Ancient Chinese Secret"

  2. Infinite harddrive! by physicsphairy · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
    1. Re:Infinite harddrive! by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  3. Shrinkage! by cfa22 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  4. Re:It's not a hard drive, it's a data black hole by Maximum+Prophet · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
  5. Re:Cheating by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  6. WARN not WORM storage by jurgen · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    :j

  7. Cow-orker bought a brick VCR by billstewart · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks