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CHKDSK and Windows Explorer "Properties" agree very well on disk capacity up to Four TeraBytes.
Thereafter, CHKDSK appears to get flustered.
Twenty minutes of searching the internet gives me a faint clue that something called the GUID Partition Table is somehow involved in all this; maybe, depending on the phase of The Moon and the Asteroid Belt.
Anybody reading who wants to explain this to me, I'm quite ready to read your words.
================LONG=======BORING==========DETAILS=================
I purchased some external USB drives.
They are (what I call) quite large: 2TB, 10TB, and 16TB
(Those are marketing numbers, not true computer science values)
My cost per TeraByte was in the range of...
- $5.17 For the small one
- $2.29 For the large one
These costs use the definition: One TeraByte = 2**40 Bytes; i.e., 1,099,511,627,776 Bytes,
My friend who is way smarter than I am tells me that I have been ripped off, and that those kinds of prices don't exist today.
He says that, when I run CHKDSK, I am going to learn my lesson about deals that are too good to be true.
So I ran CHKDSK on all three of these new great buys.
I happen to have an External USB drive with a cost of about $25.00 per TeraByte which I also included as a control observation.
The ten-minute-internet expert in me learns that CHKDSK works only up to Two TeraBytes
But then...
My own observation shows that it works fine at Four TeraBytes
And then...
CHKDSK gets confused with my two larger drives (10TB and 16TB)
And then...
The twenty-minute expert in me starts reading about the GPT (GUID Partition Table)
And then...
Win 10 Disk Management tells me nothing about any of that
And so...
I ask on CodeProject; those guys tend to have working brains.
THE TESTS WITH NUMBERS
(N.B., "Western Digital" is a real company brand name; the others are totally contrived)
2TB // HOT USB DRIVE
CHKDSK REPORTS: 2047982080 KB
2047982080 * 1024 = 2,097,133,649,920
WINDOWS EXPLORER "PROPERTIES" GIVES PERFECT MATCH
4TB // WESTERN DIGITAL USB DRIVE
CHKDSK REPORTS: 3906999296 KB
3906999296 * 1024 = 4,000,767,279,104 BYTES
WINDOWS EXPLORER "PROPERTIES" GIVES PERFECT MATCH
10TB // DAFTLY USB DRIVE
CHKDSK REPORTS: 1649913856 KB
1649913856 * 1024 = 1,689,511,788,544
WINDOWS EXPLORER "PROPERTIES" SHOWS DIFFERENT NUMBER: 10,485,604,810,752
16TB // POPART USB DRIVE
CHKDSK REPORTS: 3499077632
3499077632 * 1024 = 3,583,055,495,168
WINDOWS EXPLORER "PROPERTIES" SHOWS DIFFERENT NUMBER: 16,777,195,028,480
END-OF-ORIGINAL-POST
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Chances are your friend is right: you have been ripped off.
It's very easy for a drive to report a larger capacity than it actually has, and by not having any wiring for the more significant address lines (or more accurately the block number high addresses) can successfully write and read back from all of that capacity.
Except ... When you come to read back the earlier stuff you wrote you find it's corrupt - because it's been overwritten by the later stuff.
It's happened to me with some cheap large microSD cards, to the point where I only buy SD, USB sticks, and SSDs in general from one company (Sandisk) because I've never had a problem with them.
If you go to somewhere like Fleabay, Alibaba, or Wish and see cheap large capacity stuff it's almost certainly a scam.
Sorry.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There isn't a drive out there that's less than $double-digits per TB.
$10 for a 2TB drive? You done got ripped off. These are going for $40 to $70 a drive. Anything less is suspect.
$36 for a 16TB drive? Yon done got ripped off. 16TB drives go for $250 minimum.
Those prices should have raised alarm bells after a quick search on NewEgg or Microcenter.
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I was going to post exactly that. Over here in Canada, I've typically been looking at $30/TB as a semi-decent deal, and have found some good deals where the price got closer to $26+change / TB.
Anything significantly lower is a scam, or misprint.
We are talking about spinning disks, right?
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As far as I can tell, yes, spinning rust.
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dandy72 wrote: We are talking about spinning disks, right?
No
These are (Reputedly) Flash Drives and SSD
I gave up on trying to guess what the acronym "SSD" means, several months ago
"Some Sortta Device" is probably closest to reality.
If it's okay to do so, I'll post links to them.
All Three were eBay
Red flag which I didn't observe: Delivery Times were far beyond typical eBay norms.
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Multi-TB flash drives? SSDs cheaper than spinning disks?
I must've missed a few memos.
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*Capacity numbers are estimates with OS compression. Your results will vary based on file types stored.
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O/S compression is only activated if you set it. The default is no compression.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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File explorer reports on actual disk capacity when looking at the full disk. When looking at a folder you're given actual size as reported by the file system and the space consumed on the disk. Compressed and Sparse files can thus report far more size than there is actual disk space.
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Thanks for the links.
Seems that each one of those will take at least a day to provide useful results.
These thieves have concocted a very shrewd scam indeed.
And, from what I can infer, they are going to get away with it, and continue doing this, for the foreseeable future.
But thanks anyway.
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They are quite talented with their hands and musical instruments.
Are these actual humans ? Or robots and synthesizers ?
If they are humans, and they could sing, they could be the "Yes" of this decade if they could make up neat lyrics out of annoying routine activities (e.g., driving to work in the morning and navigating a traffic circle)
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Their Facebook page only says "I am a 486DX-33MHz-64MB processing avant-garde chiptune, synthesized heavy metal & classical music."
Can't really find anything else about it.
I think it's mostly synths though since it seems to be one person.
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|||| CONFIRMED FAKE ||||
I just did my own not-so-hi-tech Validation and Verification
Copied a 760+ GigaByte File to the Fake Drive.
Copied it back to a real drive
Windows 10 Command Line..
FC /B REALFILE FAKEFILE
...silent for the first some odd minutes (i.e., the comparison was going fine)
BUT THEN !!!
After a little while, LOOK at these totally surprising and unpredictable results...
00000009743490F8: 7F FF
00000009743490F9: D1 FF
00000009743490FA: 58 FF
00000009743490FB: 87 FF
00000009743490FC: C0 FF
00000009743490FD: 04 FF
00000009743490FE: AE FF
00000009743490FF: 35 FF
0000000974349100: D6 FF
0000000974349101: 21 FF
0000000974349102: 30 FF
0000000974349103: 13 FF
0000000974349104: D7 FF
0000000974349105: EA FF
0000000974349106: E7 FF
0000000974349107: 9B FF
0000000974349108: C1 FF
0000000974349109: 2C FF
000000097434910A: 5E FF
000000097434910B: AB FF
Okay, you guys are right. This fool and his money have gone different ways.
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I'm working for a customer who uses Visual Basic.
VB was my first language so I don't mind too much, although after years of C# it feels a bit bloated and archaic at times.
I still have another VB project as well, so at least I knew what to expect.
It's an old web forms project though, so all in all it's pretty meh
So anyway, I had to start a new project (not something they do often, they basically have the one monolith) and thought I'd pick a VB project template since that's what the client is using.
I have VB templates for WPF, WCF, Console, Library, WinForms and Test projects
But as soon as I filter on the more modern project types, like Web, Web API, Cloud, Games or Blazor, I get zero templates.
Ended up picking C# instead, as those are readily available.
I remember reading Microsoft isn't actively developing VB anymore and I'm pretty sure the earlier version of .NET Core did not support VB.
When googling the subject I find a mix of "VB dead" and "VB coming to .NET (Core)", but evidence would suggest it never actually came to .NET (Core).
All in all it seems to me like Microsoft pulled the plug or is this wishful thinking?
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I wouldn't mourn.
It was in the eighties when I wrote:
10 PRINT "Herman is the best !!1!!1!11!";;;;;
20 GOTO 10
In Word you can only store 2 bytes. That is why I use Writer.
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Clearly, the pinnacle of every VB app ever written right there.
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When I was in high school, some wizard wrote a Fortran program nicknamed The Black Death. It entered an infinite loop that printed solid lines of asterisks.
It was soon outdone by The White Death, which entered an infinite loop that "printed" form feeds.
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I worked in IBM for a few years, and once, dispatch got a call to hurry up and come fix their printer, because it was having a carriage runaway, and it was already on its second box!
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My favorite was a program that recursively created a bunch of folders with names borrowing characters from the extended ASCII set in the user's home folder. That was back in the Novell Netware days, working on DOS, so you couldn't easily batch-delete folders.
I just left the program in my share (everybody's folders were public to everyone). I wanted to prove that idiots will run unknown EXEs from unknown folders...and they did not disappoint. Eventually the admin got tired of calling out people asking why they had a bunch of non-sense folders eating up his disk space.
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Yes, and we still light candles when the lights go out.
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VB.NET, C#.NET, and C++.NET all generate the same MSIL assembly. So it is just down to the language preference at this point as the net result is 100% identical in speed and in most cases in program structure. C++.NET is quiet interesting though as it also allows STL containers to be used.
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