To anyone clued in to the tech, Walmart's "M.2 Mini Solid State Drive"'s 30 terabyte capacity and cheap price immediately mark it as a scam. Also offered on Ali Express, the gadget is a mix of crude and cunning fakery aimed at less savvy shoppers: the hardware is two hotglued SD cards with a misreported capacity, and the firmware maintains a fake directory structure created by your activities even as it continually overwrites the actual data.
For those of you who are following this thread but not understanding the scam:
— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) August 26, 2022
Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size.
Windows reports EXACTLY 15.0 terabytes. Not 14.89, Not 14.78
There used to be a funny pay-to-play awards racket run by CES for this sort of thing. The good old days!
