Find USB Flash Drive is Genuine or Fake

In my computing life, I have seen many USB flash drives, but not all the USB pen drives and memory card I have seen were genuine, yes there are times when I have seen people selling flash drives from genuine brands like Kingston, Transend and Sandisk etc.

Today we will tell you all the tools and ways you can use to find out whether a USB flash drive is fake or genuine and we will also tell you ways to identify the fake flash drive before buying. There are several free tools which will test your drive to find the right amount of space as claimed on the drive, as some of the drives are claimed to be 32 GB or 4 GB but when tested they are only like 2 GB or 4GB drives.

On the other hand some of these drives are really fake ones which does not store new data rather when ever you add more data it actually overwrite the new data in place of old data there by causing data loss. Most of these fake drives are so nicely packed that you can’t tell the difference in between a genuine USB flash drive and a fake one, by the packaging alone.

Kingston Did Took Action To Help Users Find The Fake Flash Drive

Kingston started engraving the silver usb connector tip. This is your most important evidence . On a genuine Kingston usb flash drive, as shown in the image below.

The image above is an example. Each model has different serial information.

If you do not have serial engraving information, you probably have a counterfeit! This is especially true for DataTraveler usb flash drives in the DT150, DT200, DT300, DT310, DT400 series. Engraving the usb flash drive connector is expected to continue for newer models.

Please Note: Not every USB Flash drive manufacturer has taken these initiatives to help users to detect the counterfeit drives which are fake.

Much Time Taken To Copy Data On USB Drive?

Normally when you copy 1 GB file on genuine flash drive, it should take around 50 to 180 seconds for storing the data to the drive. On the other hand, this time will be twice as long as the reading time and fake flash drive will take an excessively long time (1 to 7 hours) with only ‘pretending‘ that data is being written but the data was not actually being written on the drive or it might erase the already stored data on the drive.

Some Indications That You Have a Fake Flash Drive

Check The Price of USB Flash Drive

Yes, this would be the most easy and best way to decide if a USB flash drive is fake, if you think a large 64 GB or 32 Gb drive is coming at the price of a 4gb or 2 GB genuine drive. This will be a clear indication to you about a faulty fake USB drive.

Check The Actual Model Number on The Manufacturer Website

Yes, most of the times you may not see a Flash drive being actually manufactured by company whose big size capacity flash drive you are going to buy as some times if the company may not have that model actually being manufactured or sold in a their product line which again tells you the truth about the fake flash drive.

Cannot Format The Drive?

If you can’t format the drive through your computer, even if you select the forceful format option, and there is no file on the drive you could have opened. This symptom does indicate that it could possibly mean that your drive is either fake or its faulty.

You Cannot Copy Big Files On The Drive ?

Try coping a file of bigger size like more than a 4Gb or couple of files with more than 4 Gb in total, if the copy operation display some error or take too much time that could be mean you have a fake drive plugged in.

Check The Manufacturer Of The Flash Drive

One easy and direct way of checking a flash drive to be fake or genuine one is to check the manufacturer name under hardware options once you have plugged a pen drive and connected it to windows. In order to check the manufacturer you will need to right click on the drive icon shown in windows explorer and then go to Hardware tab and then click the properties button.

Click the details tab and then under the Property select Hardware Id and here you will see the genuine device manufacturer name, if you don’t see a name here same as written and claimed then its a fake drive. [ as shown in the image below ]

Check The Drive Space In Disk Management In Windows

If you check the drive details under disk management in windows, it will tell you correct information about the actual free space and total capacity of the drive with which you will get the idea that whether a flash drive have that much claimed space on it or not.

Software Tools To Detect Fake Flash Drives

H2testw is such popular tool which lets you test any flash drive or flash memory card which you can connect and test for right information about free space available. It will generate a report about the status of the flash drive. This tool also suitable for detection of manipulated USB sticks with the wrong size specification. We recommend to backup all data from the flash drive before running this tool, an empty flash drive would be best to test this tool.

Please Note: Use this tool only if no important data stored on the drive and it is not the boot disk on the system

It will give you a report whether the drive tested is defective in any way, as you can see in a example report snapshot below.

You can also watch the video below to know how to find a fake or genuine flash drive by watching the video below.

BurnInTest is a shareware tool which can actually test whether your USB flash drive has the amount of storage it claims or not, and test the ability of the drive to store and retrieve data without corruption. BurnInTest can be used to write, read and verify large amounts of data to and from the drive, detecting oversize capacity and poor quality drives in the process.

Please Note: You can use the evaluation version of BurnInTest, but the evaluation edition is limited to 15min runs which might not be not run long enough to test large drives.

Use BurnInTest with the following settings to test that the storage is really there.  In Configuration->Test Duty Cycles, select the Disk test, set Disk Duty cycle to 100%, duration to 0 (or a long period of time) and set number of cycles to at least 100. Turn all other tests off.

In the small test window you can see how much of the drive capacity has been tested and the current speed. Check that the entire drive capacity gets tested and check the speed is reasonable. Newer USB2.0 drives should peak above 5MB/sec

Check Flash is another free tool which another disk testing and maintaining tool. It can provide you with information regarding the speed that is achieved by the device in reading and writing operations.

To display the device information the application must perform a speed test to verify the read and write speed. The user can choose from three type of access types that are available in the application. Each type of access allows you to perform specific tests and provides useful data.

Flash Drive Tester is another freeware which allows testing of any removable media including SD, MMC, CF, USB flash pen drives for bad or unstable sectors. Especially useful for testing for fake sizes often seen on low quality USB pen drives.

Please Note: This program is not compatible with Win 7 x64 as does not work right for all the users.

USB Memory Stick Tester is another free open source application program which does test any USB based flash drive or memory card, it is designed to help testing removable storage media (such as USB memory sticks) for defects.

Please Note: This program as per the user reviews too slow and limited to 4Gb drives but a very good app indeed.