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A Reddit user who gambled a mere $20 on a 4TB external HDD from Temu has revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that the drive was actually a scam, showing that it contained nothing but innards of a microSD card reader with a generic memory card attached to it. According to the post on the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, they decided to risk purchasing the item off the marketplace because it only cost $20. By comparison, the 4TB variant of the WD My Passport external hard drive, one of our best external SSDs , costs $719.99 on Amazon . At more than 97% cheaper, it’s obvious that the item is fake, but since the absolute dollar value is minimal for the user, they decided to gamble on it.
In fact, the scam was so obvious that Temu refunded the purchase "suspiciously easily." Instead of finding a 2.5-inch SATA drive inside its plastic casing, all they found was a microSD card reader hot-glued to the back. It’s unclear if they attached it to their PC to see if it reported and delivered the claimed 4TB capacity. This is unlikely, though, because the highest capacity microSD card readily available on Amazon is only 2TB and costs at least $289.99.
Even then, some scammers tamper with the storage firmware to make it show a larger capacity than what’s available. One reliable way of finding this out is through testing software like the H2testw utility or by filling up the drive with your files, only to discover that your data has overwritten itself because of the lack of space.
Fake drives have been around for so long, but it’s proliferating even more now because the AI-driven chip shortage is causing both SSDs and HDDs to skyrocket in price. This fake drive is easy to spot, as it probably feels lighter when compared to a real hard drive, but some dupes do a good job in copying the look of the original, and you’ll only discover that it’s not what it says it is when you plug it into your PC. Even then, some knockoffs offer performance close to what you’d expect , so much so that you’d only know it’s a fake if you know what you’re looking for.
Temu is known for selling cheap knockoffs; that’s why many Reddit users do not recommend purchasing storage drives and other sensitive electronics off the website. Nevertheless, it does come through sometimes, like this user who received a free RTX 3060 GPU , although they’re yet to see if they really hit the jackpot.
