Fake External Hard Drives
We’ve noticed an increasing number of fake external hard drives appearing in the UK.
These drives are available to buy online – sometimes from reputable suppliers who have been fooled into believing they are the real thing. On other occasions people have acquired them overseas and brought them back to the UK.
These fake external drives are often manufactured in China and are made to look identical to the external hard drives offered by well know manufacturers such a Seagate and Western Digital.
Inside the fake external hard drive case is a cheap SD card produced using low grade materials that will fail within months. The memory card has usually been initialised to identify and behave as the real hard drive it is mimicking In the example shown here there is also an LED that has been fitted to mimic the hard drive power light and an additional weight to make the drive weigh the expected amount as a proper hard drive.
There is often little chance of a successful data recovery from fake hard drives as once they start to fail the SD card has degraded to such an extent that the held data on it is corrupted, no longer viable and usually unreadable.
Make sure you buy your hard drives from a reputable supplier.
Note: It’s far easier to fake an SSD than a HDD as HDDs are mechanical and have moving parts. When you power up an HDD you can usually hear it start to spin, as opposed to SSDs that have no moving parts and are silent.
