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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!"

3 of 347 comments (clear)

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

    "Ancient Chinese Secret"

  2. Shrinkage! by cfa22 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. 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)