The USB stick or microSD card looked like a bargain: 1TB or 2TB for a fraction of what a well-known brand charges. Files seemed to copy across without any errors. Then, weeks later, photos open half grey, videos won’t play, documents are empty and whole folders have vanished. If that sounds familiar, you probably have a fake-capacity drive – and before you do anything else, it’s worth understanding what has actually happened to your files, because it decides what can still be saved.
How a fake-capacity drive works
A counterfeit stick or card usually contains a small, cheap memory chip – often a few gigabytes, sometimes a few dozen – with its controller reprogrammed to report a much larger size to your computer, camera or phone. Windows, macOS and Android believe what the device tells them, so the drive formats, shows the full advertised capacity and accepts files as if everything is fine.
The problem begins once you have written more data than the real chip can hold. Depending on how the controller has been programmed, new data either quietly disappears or wraps round and overwrites data that was already stored. Either way, the computer is never told. It “copies” the file, reports success and moves on.
Signs you have a fake
- A very high capacity at a price that seems too good to be true, bought from a marketplace seller rather than a known retailer.
- Files that were fine when you first copied them but are corrupt or empty later.
- Photos that display partly, with the bottom half grey or scrambled.
- Folders that are missing or full of files with strange names.
- Copying stops making sense: the drive shows plenty of free space, yet new files are damaged.
- Unusually slow write speeds and a stick that runs hot.
Stop writing to it now
Every new file you save may be overwriting something you want back. Don’t copy anything else to the drive, don’t let a camera or dashcam keep recording to the card, and don’t format it “to fix it”. Formatting won’t give you the advertised capacity, and it makes the recovery of what is left harder.
If there are files on the drive that still open correctly, copy them to a genuine drive or your computer straight away and check each one opens from its new location. Start with the most important files.
Testing the drive – but only once your files are safe
Free tools such as H2testw on Windows and F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) on Linux and macOS check a drive’s real capacity by filling its free space with test data and then reading it back to see what survived. They are the standard way to prove a drive is fake, and the result is useful evidence if you ask the seller or the marketplace for a refund.
The catch is that these tests write to the drive. Run one on a drive that still holds files you need and you may destroy what remains. Only test once anything important has been copied off – or after a recovery lab has made its copy of the drive.
What can and can’t be recovered
It’s important to be honest about this. Data that was written beyond the real capacity of the chip was either never stored or was stored on top of something else. No software and no lab can bring back data that the memory chip never held.
What can often be saved is whatever is still physically held within the real capacity and hasn’t been overwritten yet. On many fakes that means the earliest files copied, though the pattern varies from drive to drive. Because the file system’s map of where files are is itself frequently damaged by the overwriting, ordinary undelete software often shows a confusing mess of broken files. Recovering what’s genuinely there usually means reading the whole of the real memory area and rebuilding the files from the raw data.
We see this with photos and videos from holidays, weddings and dashcams most often, because cameras will happily keep writing to a card that is “full” in reality. If the files matter, our data recovery service can examine the drive, work out its real capacity and tell you what is recoverable before any work goes ahead.
When the stick stops being recognised
Cheap counterfeit hardware also tends to fail outright: the computer says “Please insert a disk”, shows 0 bytes or doesn’t see the stick at all. That’s a separate problem with its own causes, which we explain in our guide to a USB stick showing no media or 0 bytes. The same advice applies: don’t keep plugging it in and out or running repair tools on it.
Avoiding it next time
- Buy memory cards and USB sticks from established retailers or directly from the manufacturer’s official store.
- Be suspicious of any very large capacity at a very low price.
- Test every new card or stick with H2testw or F3 before you put anything important on it.
- Copy photos and videos off cards regularly, and keep a second copy on a separate drive or in the cloud.
- Never use a USB stick or memory card as the only copy of anything.
Need help with a fake USB stick or card?
If your photos, videos or work files were on a fake-capacity drive and they matter, stop using it and call Data Doctor on 020 7394 2529. We offer a free initial consultation, and you’ll find our lab at Unit 1 The Willows, 80 Willow Walk, London SE1 5SY. You can also see the full range of our data recovery services.