Is There Really a 128 GB USB Flash Drive Out There? (Page 2 of 3)

A rash of ads and offers on eBay and on a number of Chinese sites are offering 128 GB USB flash drives. Many of them are said to be Kingston drives, although there are also fake Sony, Sandisk Cruzer, Samsung, and other less well known names. These are fakes. Kingston does not currently make a 128 GB USB flash drive. There is even a 128 GB Kingston drive currently advertised (as of April 25, 2009) on Amazon Marketplace, although it is not being sold by Amazon itself.

May 6, 2009 Amazon has removed the fake Kingston 128GB USB Flash drive sold by an Amazon Marketplace seller from their website. Amazon customer service was sent the research about the faked 128GB that was used to write this article to examine, and they seem to have decided to stop allowing the faked Kingston 128GB drive to be sold through Amazon. However, the link below to comments at Amazon about the fake Kingston 64GB USB flash drive is still active.

Many of these advertisers also offer these drives for extraordinarily low prices, along with smaller low priced drives. They are literally too good to be true. The cheapest drive you can find may well be your worst possible choice. SOSFAKEFLASH.com is a site dedicated to discovering and reporting fake drives, and the sellers and sites that sell them.

These drives have been repackaged, sometimes in a format almost identical to that of the real company, and they have been programmed to appear to be a different size than they really are. The drives often seem to work at first- sometimes not terribly well, because they are the discards which had too many bad sectors to be sold by the manufacturer- up to the actual capacity of the drive. So if you have a 4 GB drive that has been formatted to appear to be a 32 GB drive, all data you try to save on it beyond the actual 4 GB will be lost.

Here is a repackaged 2 GB Kingston Data Traveler USB flash drive sold as a 64 GB drive. You can recognized the color and style as identical to Kingston's actual 2 GB USB flash drive. This Amazon Marketplace seller also showed a screenshot showing the doctored information which appears when the drive is accessed. Read comments on this drive from Amazon confirming this is a fake.

As of May 2009, Kingston has stopped making 2 GB drives. While there are probably a few left unsold in seller inventories, if you see the lime green and white drive below, remember it was never made by Kingston in any other size than 2 GB. Even legitimate 2 GB drives in this style will no longer be available as new drives in the future.

Think you may have bought a fake flash drive? Keep reading...