Man buys 20TB portable HDD for $51. Son breaks the news that it’s a fake.

Summary

Many Arsians are the go-to IT support representative for family and friends. If you're lucky, your loved ones' problems are easily resolved with a reset, update, or new cable. That wasn't the case for a son who recently had to break the news to his father that the 20TB portable hard drive he purchased for about $50 was mostly just a plastic box with weights and a PCB. Ars Technica spoke with the Reddit user who posted about his father bringing him a "new 20T[B] HDD to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it." The Redditor, who asked that we refer to him by his first name, Martin, revealed that his dad paid £38 (about $51.33) for what he thought was a portable HDD. That's a red flag. HDDs have gotten cheaper over the years, but not that cheap. A 20TB external HDD typically costs over $200, and they’re usually much larger than the portable-SSD-sized device that Martin’s father received. A 20TB HDD in a portable form factor is rarer and can cost well over $300. Taking a hammer to the device revealed that the chassis was nearly empty, save for some iron wheel weights sloppily attached to the black plastic with hefty globs of glue and a small PCB with some form of flash storage that could connect to a system via USB-A. The "HDD" opened up. Credit: The__Unflushable/Reddit As with other PC storage scams we’ve seen online, Windows read the so-called HDD as a “19TB drive, but would then just hang if you try to do anything with it,” Martin said on Reddit. Programming the board’s firmware so that the drive appears as a high-capacity storage device on Windows is a clever trick that could convince users they're to blame. But as Windows-savvy users would point out, Windows reports drive capacities in gibibytes or tebibytes, so a real 20TB HDD would appear as approximately 18.2TB in Windows. Martin told Ars: The device appeared to mount on the desktop with the device name in Mandarin (turned out this simply said “Hard Disc”). I tried copying a file, and the name did appea...