Walmart lists a 30TB moveable SSD for $39. It’s, naturally, a rip-off

If somebody tries to promote you 30TB of solid-state storage for lower than $40, take into account turning round and working away, irrespective of what number of clip-art rockets they use of their footage.

It looks like high-capacity SSDs are getting cheaper on a regular basis, however within the phrases of a safety researcher often known as Ray Redacted on Twitter, there are nonetheless some offers which are too good to be true. Within the spirit of discovery, he purchased a “30TB” exterior SSD from AliExpress for $31.40, which additionally occurs to be listed on Walmart’s web site for $39 (I’m linking it for instructional and leisure worth, please don’t purchase it).

On the within, this “SSD” appears like two small-capacity microSD playing cards scorching glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board’s firmware has been modified so that every of those playing cards experiences its capability as “15.0TB” to the working system, for a complete of 30TB, despite the fact that the precise capability of the playing cards is way decrease. That is one other giveaway; Home windows experiences drive capacities in gibibytes (1,024 mebibytes) or tebibytes (1,024 gibibytes), whereas drive producers use gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) and terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). For this reason a 1TB drive usually solely has a reported capability of 930-ish GB, fairly than a pleasant spherical quantity.