Update, Oct. 24, 2am: The original Facebook post by Kelvin Lam has been updated. The person who made the post wrote that his friend went back to the shop and has since received "a new proper working drive". His friend was told the previous hard disk drive was probably a "display unit".

Original report:

A two-terabyte portable hard disk drive allegedly bought from Sim Lim Square turned out to be nothing more than a weighted thumb drive.

This is according to this Facebook post shared on Oct. 16, 2017:

Ruse

The contents of the HDD was revealed only after the casing was pried open.

It showed a basic thumb drive and a weight glued down to mimic the feel of a regular HDD.

According to the post, the HDD could not be formatted, read or used.

And it was described to be "too cheap to be true".

Based on appearance and running a check on the HDD shows it has at least "1.90 TB" capacity:

[related_story]

Fake computer products galore

However, fake products are readily available these days, and can even be found on legitimate e-commerce platforms.

And it is possible for the capacity of the HDD to be masked or stated inaccurately, as dedicated software and some time is needed to run tests to determine if data written onto the disk will be correct or corrupted.

The more common ruse of such HDD is that the drive is not the size advertised because most fake drives have a lower real capacity than listed by using smaller and much cheaper memory chips.

Based on the comment in the post, the product was bought on the fourth floor of Sim Lim Square.

A legit 2TB HDD can cost between S$80 to S$100.

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