Hasta La Gadget!

Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. One Russian man found a great deal on a Samsung external hard drive: such a good deal he simply couldn’t pass it up. He pulled out his plastic, ordered the drive from the Chinese reseller offering the so-low discount, and sat back and waited for his drive to show up, confident he was a great bargain hunter. 

Well, he may have been a great bargain hunter, but things started going off the rails when he realized that any media he copied to the device seemed to get cut off during playback. Video files were picking up from the end of the video, instead of starting from the beginning and playing the whole way through: he would copy an entire movie to the drive, play it from the drive, and discover it was only playing the last few minutes. Puzzled, he took it to his local computer repair shop for their advice. 

It wasn’t until the technicians at the shop opened up the drive to inspect the hard disk inside that they knew what the problem really was. The Samsung external hard drive wasn’t a hard drive at all – it was just a paid of heavy bolts affixed to the inside of the case and a 128MB (that’s right, Megabyte) flash drive without its casing attached to a USB female-adapter inside the drive casing. 

The result was a 128MB flash drive that, since it had been programmed to keep writing over itself instead of stop and tell the user they were out of space, the buyer simply didn’t know was writing over everything he copied to it as he filled the space up. Sad, but true. 

[via Engadget]