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"

Shrinkage!

[cfa22]

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

MP3 players, too.

[olsmeister]

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.

Re:MP3 players, too.

[Machtyn]

As a buyer on eBay, I've been screwed. As a seller on eBay I've been raped. I no longer use eBay.

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:Infinite harddrive!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I find that saving data is a waste of time.

All the files I've ever created, along with all the files anyone else has created, along with all the files of finite length that nobody has ever created, are waiting right there for you in /dev/random.

Latency is a bit unpredictable, though.

Re:Bloody well done.

[dgatwood]

She complained, but being eBay, they did nothing.

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.

Re:This is really just...

[dgatwood]

...it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today.

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.

Re:Cheating

[smelch]

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.