I bought a 2242 size m.2 SSD to use as lvm cache for an external DAS I’m working with. The drive is supposed to be 64GB, but when I pulled it up in gparted I found the below. (I created the partition to see what would happen.) If my calculations are correct, this drive is acting like a 1TB drive instead of a 64GB drive.
If my calculator is correct, a 64GB drive should be 59.6 GiB instead of 931.5 GiB.
So, would you trust this drive?
You must log in or # to comment.
If you want to test it yourself, you could use a tool like f3:
f3 is a simple tool that tests flash cards capacity and performance to see if they live up to claimed specifications. It fills the device with pseudorandom data and then checks if it returns the same on reading.
https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html
Hell no, that kind of behavior is what those aliexpress/wish knockoff drives do to fool the customer base stupid enough to trust the listing.
I would go so far as to say to get a refund and go to an actual store so you’re not buying bootlegs.
I agree - I wouldn’t trust it either…and, surprisingly, this one came from Amazon, and not some fly-by-night AliExpress store. (I rarely purchase something there without seeing reviews first…
But the other thing about this is that I checked out the website for the product. They are a company that specializes in enterprise and embedded products. I was pretty certain I had heard of them before in the enterprise world, which is why I purchased the drive.
The reason I bought this drive was because it specifies having a NAND cache on it (MLC, but beggars can’t be choosers with drives like this), whereas the others I looked at didn’t have (or at list didn’t have specs which listed having) any form of NAND caching.
@[email protected] - thanks f or the pointer to f3 – I’ll grab it and check the drive before I return it.
Okay - wild… The results of f3probe:
Good news: The device `/dev/sda’ is the real thing
Device geometry: Usable size: 931.51 GB (1953525168 blocks) Announced size: 931.51 GB (1953525168 blocks) Module: 1.00 TB (2^40 Bytes) Approximate cache size: 0.00 Byte (0 blocks), need-reset=no Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)
Probe time: 16.12s
Oops - misstated something before. This is an MLC NAND drive, the cache is supposed to be DDR4 DRAM. I suspect, however, this is a mis-labeled drive…
Amazon has largely become AliExpress with faster shipping. You have to be very careful to make sure that’s not what you’re getting in the first place.
Amazon also encourages counterfeits and fraud through their policy of “commingling” all sellers, even if it’s a trustworthy and reputable product. If any of those third party sellers are scammers, the entire product is tainted.
Yeah, I’m quite aware of a lot of the junk on Amazon – and I normally would stick to a well known brand like Samsung, WD, or Crucial… But there were no listings for m.2 SSD’s in the 32-64G range. At first I ordered a “Kingdata” drive (an obvious play on Kingston), but later I saw a listing for a drive from Transcend – which I recalled from my IT days, and a quick check of their website confirmed they were the company I was thinking of.
So, this is why I am fairly certain that this is some kind of labeling / packaging mistake. Transcend is reasonably well-known, and afaik aren’t scammers.
And, to top it off, I ran some additional tests on the drive… And for what it is, it is performing exactly how I would have expected: 420MB/s read/write, with 0.1msec access times – with extreme consistency. (Given that this is installed on a PCIE adapter that only has 1 lane available.)
As others said, this looks like a fake drive sold as a scam. Chances are high the drive controller has been modified to report incorrect values. Any data written to that space beyond its actual capacity will either overwrite existing data or go straight to dev/null
I’d test it with a program like https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
So, would you trust this drive?
No
There are SSD and usb stick drives with a fake size programmed into it. There are scams who sell higher capacity, but delivering lower capacity. Looking in file browser (or other tools), it still looks like 1 TB. But as soon as you fill the real 64 GB, the rest of the data is written into the void = data loss. So from the looks like this drive was originally a fake drive. And whoever sells it to you probably knows it and tries to sell it correctly as a 64 GB (or maybe the original size is even different), after getting scammed maybe?
Whatever the original story is, this drive looks fishy, acts fishy and is probably a fish. I don’t know how much you spend on this, but I would not use it, throw it away. Please don’t give or sell it to someone else, or keep it as an evidence. If possible, report the person who sold it to you.
If you can return it, return it.
If not, nuke it: overwrite the first MB or so with dd. You could also tell gparted to create a new partition table. Then, reboot, and try again to see what it reports.
And no, I would not trust it to do crucial stuff in any case. And 64GB isn’t much anyhow.
To test, write known random data to fill the drive at the block device level, reboot or otherwise clear the buffers, and then read the whole drive again validating the data is exactly correct. These fake drives should not be able to fake random data filling.
I am just guessing: Could sector size have something to do with it?
And no, I wouldn’t trust it.
Are you super sure you’ve selected the correct drive in gparted?
As long as whatever software you’re using can handle a cache failure, I can’t see why not. I’d put my
~/.cacheon there no problem.Meant to comment on this earlier… I’m implementing an LVM cache – which is filesystem / device level caching. Having a failure with something at this level could mean corrupting a 42TB storage device. This would be a far cry from losing an application level set of cache files…
That’s why I am being a lot more cautious about this drive. A failure here could be non-recoverable.
