ValiDrive - potential results database?

[Pinky665]

Amazon.ca 64GB USB drive
I have been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to use ValiDrive and today just completed my first scan. I was expecting the worst but my drive came out perfect. It occurred to me that it would be really nice if we could create a list of known good/bad drives so buyers could order one with at least some confidence that its not misrepresenting its capacity. The link to the drive is at the top of this post. The results of the scan are attached. Thank You Steve for what you do. It is greatly appreciated!

 

[PHolder]

order one with at least some confidence

If you're ordering from Amazon, the problem is the way Amazon works. They allow vendors to do very shady things with their listings, such as converting what was, say a baby crib, into a flash drive, and taking all the reviews with it. They also require some manufacturers to have a "product brand" to get certain benefits, but then they'll also let the manufacturer drop one brand and assume another, seemingly without question. That "XFLORFT" brand drive you buy today will be a "FLARGLR" brand drive tomorrow. (Not meant to be real brands, but illustrative of the problem.) They're also known to treat certain things as fairly generic... substituting one for the other unexpectedly. This makes it very hard to trust any reputation from their site.

 

[Pinky665]

Fair point for the Chinese companies. I guess the moral of the story is to buy North American whenever possible.

 

[rfrazier]

I like Samsung and Sandisk for flash memory. There are a few others that are good but some names just relabel things from companies like Samsung. Also, look on the Amazon product web page for verbiage that says "sold by" and "shipped from" or something similar. If it says sold by Amazon, I think (hope) you're less likely to get a fraudulent product. If you're buying from someone other than Amazon, you can click on their name to look at reviews of the company as opposed to reviews of the product.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. Ron

 

[SeanBZA]

Problem I hear is that they get multiple vendors with a same SKU, and put them all into the same pick locations, so that each one puts product in, but you have no control of what gets picked, and you get random pick of the items. The fakers rely on this, and put in stock SKU items identical to the real brand items, and send in the fake items to the warehouse locations, where they land up in the bins. As they sell cheaper, they tend to be picked more, and the legit sellers see little sales, but their products in the bins, real products, get sent out randomly with the fake ones, and the fakers rely on a lot of people not finding out till the return period is over, and thus they cannot simply return the items, but have to dispute, and pay for return shipping. If 20% do so, but only in the end 5% get a refund, and your profit was say 500%, because you knew the drives do not work, just appear to work, you can easily get a good income. The scammers always have a half dozen companies in process of registering as sellers, and once they pass the low bar to entry they sell real goods for a 3 month period, often using straw accounts to give good feedback, before dropping in the fakes, and dropping the prices to below competition, as the initial pricing was high, so few bought, so the straw purchasers were the only ones.

 

[manoappa]

Problem I hear is that they get multiple vendors with a same SKU, and put them all into the same pick locations, so that each one puts product in, but you have no control of what gets picked, and you get random pick of the items.

Buy directly from Samsung. https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/usb-flash-drives/

 

[walthouser]

Amazon.ca 64GB USB drive
I have been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to use ValiDrive and today just completed my first scan. I was expecting the worst but my drive came out perfect. It occurred to me that it would be really nice if we could create a list of known good/bad drives so buyers could order one with at least some confidence that its not misrepresenting its capacity. The link to the drive is at the top of this post. The results of the scan are attached. Thank You Steve for what you do. It is greatly appreciated!

One thing we can do is post validrive results on Amazon as a service to the community and reinforcement for the vendors. It will reward honest sources and discourage dishonest ones.