Small portable USB solid state drives (SSDs) of large capacity, such as 16TB, 32TB, 64TB and 128TB are widely been advertised on social media (Facebook, Youtube etc) and through online advertisements (Google Ads, Apple Ads etc). Their price, often $10s to around $100 are extremely cheap. They are cheap for a reason.
They are scam products.
Sellers also appear on well known platforms such as Amazon, AliExpress, Temu, eBay, etc. They also appear on sham websites, such as TinyCarry, Decorsdeluxe, Fruugo and other scam websites:
The drives have capacities significantly less than that advertised. Often the drives, if they work, are âflashedâ whereby the drive reports fake capacities when plugged in. For example might report 16TB, when the drive has a writable capacity of 32GB or less. The SSDs are often a SD card mount in a fancy enclosure. Some drives donât perform when received.
The other concern, is many websites selling these âSSDsâ are dodgy and are likely set up to harvest personal details, including skimming credit/debit card details.
Do not buy as you will be scammed.
If you do need a SSD, buy from a known, reputable Australian business. The risks of buying elsewhere and being scammed are very high.
I tried buying three of them on ebay over a couple of months and each time, the order was cancelled a couple of weeks afterwards with the same reason, there was a problem with my address. I even sent additional comments with my address for the two replacement orders to no avail. I think it was a scam. I paid by Paypal, so got the money back easily and the sellers didnât get my card details. Ended up finding a really good SSD on JB Hifi marketplace at a reasonable price and it turned up quickly. Iâm not sure what the scam on ebay is all about, but I noticed several other customers posted feedback stating the same thing happened to them.
While this might be the quoted reason, it is possible that someone reported it as a scam product to eBay, and eBay removed the advertisement and cancelled any orders which were placed.
eBay isnât going to state it was cancelled because they failed to stop scam products being sold on their platform - this would be a PR disaster. Hence using an excuse like tyey gave you.
Advertisements on Amazon I saw when doing some background for the post have also disappeared. Possibly for the same reasons. Reported as being scam products and removed. Even if they appear for a short time on eBay and Amazon as most platforms rely on scam products to be reported by users, it has the chance to scam victims.
The second set of drives are obviously designed to be Samsung-lookalikes but you will note that they donât say that they are Samsung.
I doubt that you can buy a 128TB portable SSD. So that by itself is suspicious. Even an 8TB portable SSD will be quite expensive. So, yeah, if it looks too good to be true ⊠it is.
As you wrote, the flash storage can report whatever capacity it wants (within the limits of the interface).
Probably timely to link back to: USB drive Reliability in Decline - #54 by person and that whole topic in general, which canvasses the possibility of flash storage lying about capacity and hence becoming totally unreliable once the amount of data stored exceeds the true capacity.
I wonder whether a marketplace like Amazon, with a global reputation to protect, would consider automatically blocking any seller that is advertising high capacity portable SSDs i.e. high enough capacity such that it doesnât exist.
By way of example, the Samsung portable SSDs (which are really nice drives) only go as high as 4TB and they are asking about $400 per TB. And my regular supplier only goes up to 8TB on any brand. [As at 2026. This paragraph isnât going to age well.]
So $65 for a non-existent 128TB drive is absurdity. Itâs almost so absurd that it is going to reduce the scammerâs sales. If they just offered actual 500GB drives as â4TBâ drives for, say, $500, they might get away with it.
These ones try and get away with their scam by saying 'Supported Capacity: 2TB(Maximum Supported Capacity,Not Inclube Hard Disk,No capacity)â in the detailed description. Comments on the product reveal consumers have been scammed rightly thinking they are a 2TB drive by information presented the advertisement.
Some scammers are âclevererâ and scam consumers with smaller capacities. But, they still stand out especially when capacity starts at mid $100s per /TB, for real portable SSDs. This is why the scams are successful, their $/TB is ridiculously cheap.
Portable Mobile Solid State Drive, USB 3.1 External Solid State Drive, 2TB Portable SSD, Up to 3.0 High-Speed Transmission, Aluminum Alloy Pocket-Sized Mac, Android, Photography, Gaming (Black)
The one I checked appears to be a USB enclosure to adapt an SSD to a USB3, and in Asian English (for benefit of doubt) âHDDâ seems to be used interchangeably with SSD. Not obvious unless one clicks the images. I suspect this is really a 0 byte of storage, just an adapter and that is what the box shows.
Hard to say though. I clicked the second one. The very first bullet point includes the word âenclosureâ. For sure, if you were in a hurry, you might not notice. (The first one has the word âenclosureâ in the product description in the opening paragraph.)
The strange thing about these is that they are quite vague regarding what disk you could put in the enclosure, hence no real guarantee that it will even work for you as an enclosure.
Such an enclosure is a legitimate device. I have some myself. But it would need to specify e.g. for M.2 2280 NVMe SSD or e.g. for 2.5" SATA III disk, magnetic or SSD etc. (An enclosure is useful for when your computer shits itself but the internal disk is still fine. You can open up the computer, remove the internal disk, pop the disk in an enclosure, and boot some other computer from the enclosure and the other computer now operates largely as if it were the failed computer.)
