Your SSD might be lying about its storage capacity. Here’s how to check

If you buy an external SSD or a USB stick today that’s being offered at a bargain price with astronomical storage capacities, you should be rather skeptical. The reason: The market is currently being flooded with sophisticated counterfeit storage devices.

Manipulated controller firmware can trick the operating system into believing the device has more capacity than physically exists. Here’s an example: Imagine you’ve bought a supposed 4TB SSD on a well-known online platform and your Windows Explorer also displays this capacity.

In reality, however, the drive contains only a comparatively tiny 64GB chip. The insidious thing about this manipulation is that the controller has been programmed to appear to acknowledge write operations successfully, even when the physical storage has long since been exhausted.

Samsung

As soon as the actual capacity is exceeded, the drive either starts overwriting the oldest data at the beginning of the storage or simply dumps new data packets into a digital black hole, while the file system continues to report an intact structure.