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How to find out the real volume of a flash drive and restore its performance (Chinese fakes for 120, 240, 500-1000 GB)

A question from the victim ...

Good day.

I bought a USB flash drive in the Chinese store AliExpress (promised for ~ 700 rubles. 500 GB). The flash drive came a couple of weeks later, inserted it into the USB port and looked at the properties on my computer: actually 500 GB. I was delighted!

But the joy was not long. After I copied 3-4 films onto it, a recording error appeared. I try to format it - it is not formatted. What to do, can it be restored? I began to doubt the quality of such products, maybe some kind of fake flash drive, what do you think?

Good day!

In general, my personal opinion: a normal product cannot cost less than the market average, and is cheaper than its cost.

If we are talking about a flash drive, then for this money you can buy a 4-16 GB flash drive, depending on the manufacturer and interface. And the very fact that a rather expensive product is being offered for such a small price should have already alerted ... ☝

But be that as it may, and such a flash drive can be returned to normal performance, of course, only its volume will not be 500 GB, but much less ...

I'll tell you about everything in order.

👉 To help!

Instructions for determining the real speed of the flash drive

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Determining the volume of a flash drive

A few words about memory cells and the controller

Any flash drive consists of memory cells (in fact, where data is written) and a controller (this "piece" links memory cells and allows you to work with them).

It is clear that if the memory cells in the flash drive are 8 GB, then you cannot write more than 8 GB to the flash drive (this simply cannot be physically done). But what is responsible for the displayed volume in the properties of the flash drive and for its operation? Controller! ☝

Controllers are often made universal, immediately for a specific series of flash drives. And then it is stitched in the right way, for a specific volume of the flash drive.

But there are cunning dealers who reflash the controller the way they need it - and the flash drive in your properties starts to show 500 GB or 1000 GB (in fact, the memory cells will have the same 8 GB). Do you feel where the "dog" is buried? 😎

Actually, dishonest sellers / manufacturers can reflash a USB flash drive for the volume they need and sell it. And how it will work when those 8 GBs are full - they don't care!

Yes, and the deception is usually not revealed immediately: many users fill the volume gradually (and not everyone will understand what's what - some kind of error has appeared ... Well, they often appear 👀).

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Flash drive diagnostics: determining the real size of memory cells

For this work, we need a special. utility 👇 ...

👉 H2testw

Website: //www.heise.de/download/product/h2testw-50539

Utility from German programmers. Very simple, no installation required.

The main purpose: scanning a flash drive for its real physical memory. It will help you quickly and accurately determine the real state of your drive: volume, speed. I will give below testing of one such "super" flash drive for 120 GB.

And so, below I will show you first properties experimental flash drive (this will make it clearer what it is about).

Note: copy all important data from this flash drive, in the process of restoring it, all current data from it will be deleted.

Flash drive 120 GB

Next, you need to download and run the utility H2testw, and:

  1. switch the language in the utility to English (I think this is more convenient 👌);
  2. select a carrier - that is, our flash drive (Select Target button);
  3. press the "Write + Verify" button, and patiently wait for the end of the test (which can take several hours, it all depends on the speed of the flash drive and its volume).

Start scanning

I specially highlighted the scan results:

  1. Writing: real write speed to a USB flash drive (2.82 MByte / s);
  2. Verifying: real speed of reading from a flash drive (12.4 MByte / s);
  3. 14.8 GByte OK: the actual size of the flash drive, i.e. ~ 15 GB.By the way, copy or remember the number of sectors - 31068072 (allocated in the screenshot below, you will have your own number! It will be needed to restore the flash drive).

Real speed of reading, writing and real volume of the flash drive

By the way, if everything is in order with your flash drive, then you will see not a red strip at the bottom of the utility window, but a green one and it will be written "Test finished without errors" (translated into Russian "Testing completed without errors"). Example below 👇 ...

Test passed normally, no errors found

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Treatment and recovery of a flash drive

To format the drive and restore its real size, we need one more utility: MyDiskFix.

👉 MyDiskFix

English version: //www.usbdev.ru/files/mydiskfix/

(What's interesting is a Chinese-made utility)

MyDiskFix is ​​a free utility designed for low-level formatting of failed flash drives. Able to reanimate media, and bring them into working order. With its help, you can restore the real volume of the flash drive.

Now let's look at how to format a USB flash drive in the utility.MyDiskFixand restore its work, and its real volume.

And so, first we launch the utility, and enter the following parameters:

  1. we indicate the carrier (our flash drive), the graph Choose Device;
  2. put the formatting method in Low-Level (low-level);
  3. we indicate our number of working sectors (column Sectors), which we got from the H2testw utility (see the previous screenshot);
  4. and press the button Start Format (see screenshot below);
  5. note: if you have a Chinese version of the MyDiskFix utility, then be guided by the location of the modules in English, all functions in Chinese are located in the same places!

    Configuring the MyDiskFix utility

After utility MyDiskFix will format the USB flash drive, you will see a message from Windows that a new media has been found without a file system, and a proposal to format it (see the screenshot below).

Formatting a USB flash drive in Windows

You can go to yourself "My computer" select a USB flash drive and format it in a standard way. By the way, please note that the volume of the flash drive will be real, i.e. 14.5 GB (not ~ 120 as before)!

The flash drive is restored, the real volume of the flash drive is 14.5 GB

The flash drive should now work fine. 👌

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PS

If it was not possible to restore the flash drive in this way, try to find a special utility for the controller of the flash drive (having found out the VID and PID identifiers in advance) and format the media with it. In general, this topic is quite large and I covered it in one of my articles (I give the link below).

👉 To help!

USB flash drive recovery: controller identification and drive firmware - see step-by-step instructions

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That's all, everybody has a cold head when choosing and buying goods.

Good luck!

👋

First published: 23.06.2017

Correction: 01/03/2020

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