ValiDrive confirmed false capacity, now I want clean and use the drive.

[Das Capitolin]

Hello. First time visitor, first time user.
I work with digital storage, and so when a 2TB USB flash drive was suggested by a recent store with a good return policy it was too tempting to pass up. The results were exactly as expected, as ValiDrive confirmed it was really a much smaller capacity.
In previous experiences with this fake capacity issue (on Micro SD cards), I was able to use DISKPART -clean all to clear sectors of programming and utilize the device for proper (yet mislabeled) storage. That does not seem to be the case with this USB drive, at least so far, as the device offered and completed a format during a -clean all operation.
While this is not a ValiDrive issue, and hence possibly the wrong place to post this, it was the logical next step after using ValiDrive. Since I have already received a refund, I must ask what others do to make these drives legitimate?

 

[Scott]

Since I have already received a refund, I must ask what others do to make these drives legitimate?

We don’t. We assume the drives are untrustworthy and throw them away.

 

[DanR]

Most others would simply throw such a drive in the trash.

You do not have a small free drive. You do have a small dodgy drive with hacked firmware capable of doing whatever it has been programmed to do.

The firmware has been hacked to lie about the true capacity of the drive. The hacked firmware also suppresses write errors when writing to nonexistent capacity and lies that all is well.

The hacked firmware is very possibly why –clean all is not working properly.

Throw the drive away. It should never be trusted with any data.

One more thing; The 69 GB apparent validated capacity is an odd and I think impossible size for NAND memory. This suggests defective NAND with the potential to fail further at any time. Another reason the throw it away.

 

[Das Capitolin]

One more thing; The 69 GB apparent validated capacity is an odd and I think impossible size for NAND memory. This suggests defective NAND with the potential to fail further at any time. Another reason the throw it away.

If you take 69.3GB at face value, then yes, it's an odd capacity. I suspect that this particular compromised drive is likely overprovisioned for background data transfer to help hide its true limit, making better sense that strange capacity.

 

[PHolder]

what others do to make these drives legitimate

Throw them in the electronics recycling, where they belong?

If someone sold you a burger, and you found out, just as you were about to eat it, that it was actually made of 75% sawdust, would you still want that burger? It's the same thing with these bad drives. You have NO IDEA what compromises were made to make the product... it may have all of the data verification and recovery routines in the fake flash controller NOPed out. It probably returns "success" for every event, no matter the actual result. It will likely not fail gracefully when the flash is near end of life. It probably contains cheap, 3rd class, flash memories that were deemed unfit for a quality product.

In the end, the only likely result from asking a fake to pretend it's real is heart-ache... don't go there!