We Apologize: USB Key at €6 With Only 20GB, not 2TB

Following our article to days ago, USB 3.0 Flash Key at 2TB at Only €6 !
At this incredible price, we ordered ten of them, we got this email from Jim Handy, Objective Analysis, for us the best specialist in flash semiconductor:

Bonjour, mon ami!
 
I saw your article about the incredibly cheap USB flash drives and am wondering if there’s a language issue. Perhaps these drives are really 20GB but the vendor accidentally mislabeled them.
 
It’s an easy thing for a Chinese company to do. East Asian languages revolve around tens of thousands while European languages use thousands. It’s like they put a comma (or a point, or a space) for every four digits while we do it for every three. We say 10,000 or 100,000,000. They say 1,0000 or 1,0000,0000.
 
This is an issue that sometimes makes conversations between the two cultures confusing. I have often spoken with people who translate between the two and make a mistake of one or two orders of magnitude.
 
If so, the vendor may be selling a 20GB drive (with a value of something over $5.00) but mistakenly calling it 2TB.
 
You wrote that one of your USB drives hung up when it got to 20GB. I bet that this is the real size of the drives! Why don’t you use your PC to look at the properties for one of these, or try to put more than 20GB into another drive and see if it hangs up like the other one did.
 
Just to underscore how absurd this price is. I will tell you that the lowest spot price that NAND flash ever reached was $0.15/GB or $150/TB in mid-2016. Today’s spot price is closer to $0.25/GB.
 

Following this email, note that the capacity of the key was officially advertized at 2TB.

We do two operations:

1/ First we verify the information about the Chinese flash key on our Apple MacBook Pro.

As you can see the capacity supposed to be is 2.01TB.

2/ Then we try to store more than 20GB on the key. It was not possible meaning that the device has a maximum capacity of 20GB and not 2TB as announced by the Chinese web site and on our order. So the Chinese pirates – how do they do that? – even were able modify the information on the controller of the key in our system.

We also learned from an old specialist of floppy disks that some pirates did the same thing in the past, offering 2MB diskettes with only 1MB capacity.

As we wrote in our former article: “It’s impossible to get such a capacity at this price.” We have better just to think that and not to publish an article on the key.

We apologize and we advise our readers never to go to the Geek web site and we are going to try to tell them that they are robbers.

Note also that, consequently, we came back with all our former four external 2.5-inch HDDs.