Walmart was caught pawning off fake 30TB hard drives

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Walmart has been allowing faked SSDs to be sold on its third-party marketplace. The company has taken the listings down after a security researcher bought one to take apart.

Cybersecurity researcher Ray Redacted first saw a similar external solid-state drive (SSD) on China-based dropshipping marketplace, AliExpress. The thing that tipped him off to a possible fake? A 30-terabyte SSD selling for $30.

Normal, legit external SSDs don’t even exist in that capacity. A 2-terabyte drive from Samsung usually retails around the $250 mark.

Speaking to Motherboard, Ray said he decided to buy one as a learning opportunity to work on with his son. They took it apart together, and what they found was some fakery.

Board says HUB-TF2 and has two glued down cards (trans flash? SD Cards?). pic.twitter.com/gKd84tXIXI

— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) August 25, 2022

See, the external, supposedly-30TB SSD was nothing of the sort. Instead, they found a custom circuit board with two microSD cards glued to it.

In Windows File Explorer, the drive looked like two 15TB drives. Not what the listing said, but sure, it adds up. Or does it?

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The weirdness continued with the drive only working over USB 2.0 and only with the cable it shipped with. That would take 250 days to test just one of the two 15TB drives for accuracy.

Of course, the drives aren’t anywhere near 15TB each. The scammer uses two smaller drives, maybe 512GB or 1TB each. Then they write custom firmware for the drive, which makes Windows think it has a larger capacity.

Interesting that there are different versions of that. I got it with a usb stick in it. pic.twitter.com/zxPEPgMmqv

— Megavolt Smithy-vaan (@SmithyVaankrach) August 26, 2022

If this was a legit 15TB capacity, it also wouldn’t be reporting at exactly that size in Windows. It’d be 14.89TB or smaller due to how capacities are handled.

To be fair to Walmart, a third-party seller scamming isn’t their fault. What is their fault is not having the tools to audit their third-party items.

The other marketplaces that allow third-party sellers, like eBay and Amazon, also have rampant fraud with SD cards and other storage devices.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.