New Freeware Detects Fake USB Drives with Inflated Capacity

News
By Mark Tyson
published

Steve Gibson developed Windows freeware app also scans for read/write errors.

ValiDrive 1.0 testing
(Image credit: GRC)

Veteran US software engineer and security researcher Steve Gibson has announced a new drive tool from Gibson Research Corporation (GRC). The underlying purpose of ValiDrive v1.0 is to “spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulently missing storage,” which has become ever more important given the influx of fake drives flooding online retailers. This freeware tool also checks any USB-connected drive for read / write errors.

Dirty dozen fake flash storage drives, bought from Amazon last month (Image credit: GRC)

In case it isn’t clear from your own experience of buying discount USB drives why it will be useful, Gibson reveals that he bought 12 drives from Amazon in the last month, and ValiDrive proved that “every single one of them was a bogus fraudulent drive.” See the image above for the motley collection of deceitful drives that can be picked up from one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces.

Gibson’s Amazon shopping splurge was prompted by testers of SpinRite v6.1 (GRC's premier mass storage maintenance and data recovery system) being perturbed at the “diabolical” proliferation of fake USB drives on the market. These fraudulent drives don’t offer the capacities advertised and will routinely lose data to maintain their deceit.

(Image credit: GRC)

Above, you can see an example ValiDrive UI screenshot showing a scan result. GRC says that this USB drive was sold as a 2 TB capacity device, but only 62 GB of capacity was present and verified by the tool.

ValiDrive certainly sounds like quite a thorough testing tool. Where Windows and lesser sys-info tools are happy to go along with and misreport fraudulently described drive capacities, ValiDrive is claimed to put the storage through a “576-region spot-check to test the readability, writability, and true storage presence of any [USB connected] drive.”

Fake 1 TB driver from Amazon

(Image credit: Future)

ValiDrive 1.0 is a pleasingly compact and portable app, as we have grown to expect from GRC, weighing in at just 95KB. Some may criticize the Windows 3.1 aesthetics, but others will find it no-frills and functional, or even retro-cute. In addition to Gibson’s dirty dozen Amazon drive testing, respondents to the developer’s Twitter post seem pretty happy with ValiDrive so far. Several tested drives which users suspected to be fraudulent were found to be so. Meanwhile, others testing big brand drives from reputable sellers have reported success in capacity verification.

We have recently reported on fake SSDs and fake high-performance external SSDs packed with microSD cards.

ValiDrive 1.0 is available to download now and is freeware.

Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
Freelance News Writer

Mark Tyson is a Freelance News Writer at Tom's Hardware US. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

37 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    95KB, that's the way things should be.
    Nice tight, & efficient.

    Not bloated, slow, & crappy like MS Teams.
    Reply
  • vanadiel007
    Gibson commonly writes software that sounds very amazing, but turns out not exactly like it.
    I mean, he makes the assimilator: The ASSIMILATOR is a stand-alone, high-performance, application-specific, multi-protocol, dual NanoProbe/GENESIS TCP/IP stack equipped, Internet Protocol Torture Testing Device:

    I sure would like to know what a dual nanoprobe/GENESIS TCP/IP stack is... I mean, it sounds amazing, right?
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Kamen Rider Blade said:
    95KB, that's the way things should be.
    Nice tight, & efficient.

    Not bloated, slow, & crappy like MS Teams.
    Why would you compare a single use application like this, to MS Teams?
    Reply
  • greenreaper
    Didn't they just release a new Teams that was meant to be faster? Doubt it's coded in assembly, though.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    Kamen Rider Blade said:
    95KB, that's the way things should be.
    Nice tight, & efficient.

    Not bloated, slow, & crappy like MS Teams.
    It's an application that only does one thing. And even then, one could argue that's bloated for the one thing it does when you consider a 3D game with detailed models, textures, and lighting was able to be pushed into 97KB.

    In any case, Teams is made with Electron, which essentially is a stripped down Chromium meant to work as a framework to build applications on top of. Which means developers can focus on building the application itself, rather than the foundation underneath.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Wish he would've written this USB detection tool for MacOS as well, which now has over 20% of the market - and Linux.

    Which taken altogether have just over 30% of the market. That's a big oversight. Pretty much 1 in every 3 people can't use this without some sort of add-in layer/VM/api/etc.

    What would a Linux user or Mac user do to accomplish this same goal?
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    ezst036 said:
    Wish he would've written this USB detection tool for MacOS as well, which now has over 20% of the market - and Linux.

    Which taken altogether have just over 30% of the market. That's a big oversight. Pretty much 1 in every 3 people can't use this without some sort of add-in layer/VM/api/etc.

    What would a Linux user or Mac user do to accomplish this same goal?
    A tool already exists for Linux: https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
    You could probably compile this on macOS using gcc or clang, assuming the tool doesn't use some sort of weird library.
    Reply
  • AgentBirdnest
    I like this! Almost everyone I know has fallen for these scams. I just tried the app, and I'm going to start sending this to friends and family. My mom wouldn't have a problem using this. There are no options or multiple-choices; there is just a single button to start the test. Simple and easy (it can take a while, though. But uses close to zero resources, so whatevs. 28MB RAM usage while the test is running.)
    Reply
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    USAFRet said:
    Why would you compare a single use application like this, to MS Teams?
    Teams is bloated for being a glorified Instant Messenger / Slack clone.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Kamen Rider Blade said:
    Teams is bloated for being a glorified Instant Messenger / Slack clone.
    Be that as it may....the supposed bloatedness of Teams has nothing to do with this little application.
    (and if you think that is all Teams is/can do, you're mistaken)
    Reply