ValiDrive is a free, portable tool for Windows, developed by Gibson Research Corporation (GRC) to check if USB storage drives (sticks, SD cards, SSDs) are fake. It verifies the actual capacity of a drive, revealing if it lists a larger size than it actually has.
Key features of ValiDrive:
Detecting Fake USBs: Many cheap USB sticks (especially from unknown sources) are listed as 1TB or 2TB, but in reality they only have 32GB or 64GB. ValiDrive exposes this scam.
How does it work: It performs quick, random spot-checks across the entire extent of the device's memory to confirm that data is being written and read correctly.
Reliability: It does not rely solely on the capacity declared by the device (which may have been tampered with), but actually checks whether the sectors are functional.
Immediate Update: It graphically displays which parts of the storage medium are valid and which are “fake” or damaged.
The drive maps shown below are typical of the fake USB drives flooding the market. In this example, a drive was sold as having a capacity of two terabytes (2TB) but actually only contains 62 gigabytes (62GB) of actual storage space:
https://www.grc.com/files/validrive.exe
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
