I bought this USB flash drive from eBay seller garysin2008 on 11/29/09 for $13.87, with free shipping from China. What a bargain!, I thought, naively...

Little did I know that 85% of the flash memory being sold on eBay is of faked capacity. It took almost a month to arrive here in the USA.

After having some trouble getting the drive working well, I did some research, and discovered a German program called H2testw that can verify the actual capacity of a flash drive. Mine turned out to be a 4GB model that had been reprogrammed to report itself as 32GB. Some fakes are even worse, having less than 1GB actual capacity.

There is lots more information on this site:

sosfakeflash.wordpress.com

As always, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is!

There are two more photos in this set, of the internals of this drive.

Please click on the following link to go to an alert page on SOSFakeFlash.com about fraudulent eBay seller garysin2008:

sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/garysin2008-urgent-...

This is the side of the PCB with the flash memory chip, which is part number FBNL63A59K3PG

The datasheets for this part indicate an actual capacity of 4GB, just as the H2testw program reported.

I've had no luck yet reprogramming this drive back to 4GB, as I can't find software that has this flash memory chip listed in it's database.

There are two more photos in this set.

Please click on the following link to go to an alert page on SOSFakeFlash.com about fraudulent eBay seller garysin2008:

sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/garysin2008-urgent-...

UPDATE (02/03/10):

I actually managed to fix it a few days ago, using UD Tools 1.2.0.8.

It's now a functional 4GB drive, albeit with a few bad blocks mapped out during the low-level formatting. The bad blocks are no doubt due to the low-grade flash chip used.

Here's a view with the aluminum cover slid off.

The MW6208E USB controller chip is visible. Knowing the part numbers of the ICs inside a flash drive can help you to Google up the correct software to reprogram the drive back to actual capacity.

You don't want to leave the drive as-is, because any data written to it beyond the actual capacity will corrupt the drive.

There are two more photos in this set.

Please click on the following link to go to an alert page on SOSFakeFlash.com about fraudulent eBay seller garysin2008:

sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/garysin2008-urgent-...