As we previously reported there is a current criminal trend and scam that involves selling fake USB memory sticks that display a larger memory capacity than what the drives true memory capacity actually is. This allows criminals to sell a 2GB memory stick and on the surface make it look like it has a 64GB of memory.
It may appear like you can use this capacity on the drive, but as soon as you go over its real capacity the files will become corrupted and read odd and weird file names.
The free program H2testw has proved its worth in detecting flash drives which have been programmed to misreport capacity. The interface is in German but has the option to run in English. It is free and standalone. Nothing is installed into the operating system. You should use this program for testing counterfeit USB flash drives, it's easy to use, tested to work on 1.1 and 2.0 USB ports and it's tested to work to analyse drives advertised as 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacity. Please note that this program does not work on Macs.
The software will report back what the operating system sees the memory size to be and will test this by writing multiple 6MB files onto the drive up to the reported size – requiring no work on your part except patience if it is a large drive and a slow computer, and then it will attempt to read back the files and verify them. The software will also produce detailed reports showing the true capacity, how much data has been lost/corrupted and whether there are aliased memory addresses if problems are found.
If your device works as claimed it will tell you that the test ran without problems and you can delete the test files. If not, you will get a detailed report.
Save the downloaded zip file to your desktop and run the exe file in the folder to install the program onto your computer. To test your USB flash drive, launch the program, select your language (German or English) and select the target drive.
