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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!"
"Ancient Chinese Secret"
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.
wow, something alongside a couple of nuts that's smaller than it's supposed to be.
I have a friend that ordered a dirt cheap 4 gig MP3 player from some outfit in Hong Kong. He got it, and plugged it in, and it dutifully reported it had 4 gig of free space. As he started loading it up, it kept locking everything up after about 2 gig. Turns out, it only had 2 gig of memory, but was doctored to report it had 4 when queried.
This is reason 1 why your average corporation has a mini-corporation inside it that does nothing but accept packages and perform testing on their contents to be sure that requirements are being met. Doesn't matter if it's a blade server or a box of pencils. Sleaze is an industry. So is acceptance testing. But if you do it right it doesn't just prevent fraud, it increases your reliability a ton, as it keeps you from stuffing parts that are merely statistical DOA.
(Reason 2 is that without that layer, there's no tracking of who got what, and embezzlement is an industry too.)
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)
I haven't seen the principle applied to faking an HDD before; but the same phenomenon crops up fairly frequently with USB flash drives and flash memory cards sourced from suspiciously cheap ebay sellers and similar places.
The cruder examples are simply a low-capacity drive, with a high capacity label, and a specially doctored partition table and fat32 filesystem written to them. Simply reformatting them will reveal their true size and make them safely usable(to the degree that you would trust the quality of such a device...).
The more sophisticated ones have doctored firmware in the chip that handles abstracting the raw flash into a USB mass storage device, and the OS will detect their false size. You can only determine the true size empirically: exactly what behavior the fake blocks will exhibit varies(all zeros, all ones, garbage); but the real blocks will behave normally. If you are a gambling sort, you can put a partition of exactly that size on the drive and hope for the best; but that isn't really advisable...
Every abstraction layer is a potential lie, I suppose.
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
You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).
The same goes for MP3 players which use Flash as well.
My wife was caught by that scam on eBay. About 4 or 5 years ago she bought what was reportedly a 4 GB MP3 player from Hong Kong - no name brand, but it was a good price. (At this point I would like to point out I did council her on not buying anything electronic from Hong Kong. The horror stories about cheap products from that part of the world plus it being far too cheap against anything from north America made me suspicious). After a couple weeks she complains it messed up. So I dutifully wipe it using the disc which came with the player and reloaded on everything she put on previously. Suddenly I get an error message that the player is full when I had put no where near the 4 GB limit on it yet. So before I try again I take the model number and punch it into Google (although it might have been metacrawler back then). The first link which popped up was about this model having the exact same issue I was having. it turns out that the seller was taking 1 GB drives, changing the firmware to read 4 GB and selling them as such. The kicker was that the supplied format disc just rehacked the MP3 player instead of doing it right. I ended up downloading a correct recovery disc for it which did in fact reveal the 1 GB limit. She complained, but being eBay, they did nothing. In the end she bought a 4 GB Sansa and it serves as my daily distraction from my commute. (Note: I did load Rockbox onto it because the Sansa OS is terrible and can't be happier.)
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
This is why you complain to your credit card company instead. Then eBay has a choice of either eating the loss or going after the seller.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Agreed. I just went down a list of the products I've bought in the past year, and if you ignore DVDs and books, the percentage that have worked correctly for more than a week is somewhere around zero.
USB flash drive watch (ThinkGeek): broke after four days. When the replacement arrived, the flash drive was halfway pulled apart, the glue that held it together having apparently failed. This tells me that it probably failed QA testing (somebody had to have tried to open it or else it would not have been hanging halfway out), but got shipped to me in spite of that. Yikes.
USB keychain drive from Kingston: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four or five months. Replacement drive with substantially inferior case: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four days.
USB keychain drive from Lacie (XtremKey): the wire part that held it onto my keychain broke after less than a week, and has subsequently been replaced by a hand-crimped steel cord from Home Depot. Details in my Amazon review.
Konica Minolta color laser printer: needs a technician to recalibrate it right out of the box because the fuser isn't fusing properly on card stock.
Eyeglasses arrived from the manufacturer with a scratch across the middle of one lens.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
And the list goes on. So yeah, I hear you. The only difference between the Chinese knock offs and the worst American products are that the worst American products at least ostensibly work for a couple of days before they don't. Usually. And this is what happens when consumers don't care about product quality.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
Hey everybody on the internet, stop trying to make every wrong equal to every other wrong. Massive counterfeiting operations run by the Chinese government are totally not the same as standard political games you see everywhere. It may not be worse, it may not be better, but the point is they're unrelated. So stop being a turd.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
The only thing funny about China is if I tried to pull one tenth of the stunts they do, over here in Canada/US, I'd spend the rest of my days in court and/or jail for fraud.
If it were just about copyright, I'd turn a blind eye, because I'm all for copyright reform, but this mentality extends far beyond the conscious disobedience of extortionary legislation. At least US corps put SOME effort into being sneaky, whereas the standard Chinese go-to is to do it all over someone's face and then state "I don't know". Struggling grocery store burns to the ground, owner says "I don't know" as he cashes the insurance cheque. Noodle house has a sudden and absurdly dramatic roach infestation, rival next door says "I don't know". Computer is brought to a shop with a virus, comes back with two more and a downgraded video card, techie says "I don't know".
I shit you not, I've been working with asian business owners for well over a decade, and with all these stories they tell me, I can't help but distrust them because after each anecdote they say "I would do the same thing if I saw an opportunity". Sometimes I think my size and lack of morals is the only reason they haven't try to pull that bullshit on me... yet.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
compulsive liars, cheats and thieves who will do absolutely anything to win. And it's ingrained behaviour that will never change. Even 200 years ago, British traders knew very well that the Chinese simply couldn't be trusted.
Which is why when the West declines and the Chinese rule the world, we're all fucked.
I got 2 different keys of the latter sort (after format, it reports 32Gb, but they really are 4Gb).
BTW, I don't use them, since I didn't find any way to only use the first 4Gb.
There is no magic.
When you write a byte at a given location (for example at 9Gb), it's written at this location modulo 4Gb (in my example at 1Gb), and there is a little protection for the first megabytes, so that the FAT32 is not overwritten when the key is full, to avoid revealing that the key is fake.
When you buy an USB key, ALWAYS use CheckFlash:
http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/chkflsh_en
In a few minutes, it will tell you if your USB key is correct.
With my first fake one, I get the first error:
Error at address F5E56000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
and everything after that is dead.
With the second fake one, I get the errors:
Error at address EF800000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EF82C000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EF928000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFA24000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFB20000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFC1C000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFD18000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFE14000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address EFF10000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
Error at address F000C000h: expected "10101010", found "00000000".
after that, the errors are more irregular.
Note that the write speed is 5.7Mb/s for the first 4Gb of the key, and 25Mb/s after that.