Counterfeit Kingston USB KEY
I was really happy to find such a deal on Craigslist: a Kingston DataTraveler 200, 128GB USB Key for $100!
I am usually paranoid, but the seller was cool, we talked about Mac OS X, as he virtualize it on it’s professional laptop using VMWare, and during this time, I did a format+zeroing on my Mac to check if everything runs okay with the key, and it seems good, I stopped it at 50% approximately, 64GB is *NOT* a usual capacity for counterfeit USB Key.
I actually use 26.7GB storage on the key, everything run smooth, I backup important things on it, to have them in my backpack, just in case of. Today, I copied some data to my laptop, and tried to open PDF documents I wrote for a client (I do LAMP consulting among other thing). Preview couldn’t open them, even a simple text file could not be open by TextEdit: it Appeared empty. I checked using Terminal and vi tool, and it reported that all data are 0’s.
This is better than old generation counterfeit: you could format it to full capacity, write to it up to full capacity without any error, it just don’t write data, there’s no memory space to store them, and when read, just send back 0’s to fool OS or Disk Utility! Real smart, and impossible to detect it using Disk Utility (maybe doing 2 partitions???).
Anyway next step will be to remap dynamically the little storage to written data, so anyway even using 2 partitions to check, you will never know!
I know, I was totally stupid to buy it, but I thought that DiskUtility format will detect it and report error in case of counterfeit, it’s not the case!
I am not the kinda guy that let down, so I decided to analyze the key, the behavior of the electronic that hide the real capacity and the actual or future behavior of counterfeited USB Key, and create a FREE simple utility to detect them in no time. It’s name UsbKeyChecker, and it will be my first real Mac OS X application. Because we all need it!
