ValiDrive: Is your USB drive lying to you?

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[zat_so]

 

Download link: https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Steve discussing ValiDrive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpEbuqq_m1c

From Steve Gibson at Gibson Research Corporation:

Why is this a serious problem?

At first this might seem like a minor annoyance: You purchase a 1 or 2 terabyte drive at a bargain price and you receive a 64GB drive instead. But that’s  NOT what happens here!

[Moderator edit] removed content to avoid copyright issues. Please post a precis and link, not the entire article.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by zat_so.

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wavy, Cybertooth, SteveTree

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I received information about this thread via a ‘tools’ subscription. When I followed the link to the thread it returned a 404. A search for ValiDrive resulted in nothing. To find it, I did an author search, then found it in topics started.

BTW: interesting YouTube clip. My USB drives come from reliable sources so I did not try the tool. Gibson specifically mentions Amazon but does not state whether it was the Amazon store he bought from or 3rd party sellers. I couldn’t be bothered checking all his links but his first three are recorded as sold by hopkins;  GTIOT-US; and vikye.h. That’s 3 from three that are not sold by Amazon. In my experience, Amazon seems to source from legitimate suppliers, but I cannot say that for certain. HINT: for every Amazon transaction, look for ‘Sold by’ on the RHS of the product’s Amazon page.

Group A (but Telemetry disabled Tasks and Registry)
1) Dell Inspiron with Win 11 64 Home permanently in dock due to "sorry spares no longer made".
2) Dell Inspiron with Win 11 64 Home (substantial discount with Pro version available only at full price)

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Those drive from mostly active seller listings on Amazon for which most of the shipment is fulfilled by Amazon. Looks like a couple sellers may have closed shop. Thankfully a few real people are leaving real reviews.

Anyway these may show up again on Amazon with other weird shop names and another case, some sellers of these junk drives lie on their listing better than others.

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wavy

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