Alex Yumashev passes along a funny story about a mysterious hard drive that someone brought into his Russian friend’s computer repair shop. A customer brought in a broken 500 GB USB drive, purchased “in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price”: What was especially odd about the drive is that it successfully stored some data, but ‘forgot’ all that had come before it: Try to save a movie file on the drive and it would only be able to play the last five minutes of the movie.
Above, you can see what they found when they opened it up:
It’s a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a “looped” mode – when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they’re still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports “correct” file sizes and disk-capacity. And the “looped-overwriting” does not touch the other files present on the drive.
The device looks pretty convincing – lots of tech labels and stuff… The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it “works” in the store.
This is also apparently a pretty common type of scam on eBay, although usually not executed so cunningly.
(Alex Yumashev via HN)
