If you see a 16 terabyte portable SSD on Amazon for $100 or less, don’t buy it. Such a drive would cost thousands of dollars. These are nothing more than a scam, and don’t work well at all. We bought one and got a glorified 64GB hard drive.

When it comes to portable hard drives, bigger is usually better. You want lots of space for photos, videos, or anything else. So when Amazon offers a 16TB external SSD hard drive for under $100, that sounds perfect. It would be if it weren’t a giant scam. I know because I bought one and tore it apart.

The Suspiciously Underpriced Oversized Tiny Hard Drive

You don’t have to go far to find these fake hard drives. Start a search for a 16 terabyte (TB) external hard drive, and you’ll get dozens and dozen of entries. Most are from completely unheard-of brands like “WIOTA” or “SAJIULAS.” But while these strange brands offer hard drives under $100, options from well-known brands like Western Digital are in the multi-hundred dollar range.

It gets more suspicious. Compare the sub-$100 offering to the others, and you’ll notice the case appears to be much smaller. The well-known brands don’t offer 16TB SSD portable drives; they’re merely enclosures for traditional spinning drives. But the sub $100 brands claim to be M.2 SSD, one of the most expensive and fastest formats out of there. For reference, the largest portable SSD Samsung offers is 2 TBs, and it goes for $180.

Also worryingly, there’s the fact that whether it’s “WIOTA” or “SAJIIULAS” or some other unknown brand, every picture is exactly the same. All of that doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s unlikely generic brands managed to find a way to sell the most expensive type of storage for a third of the price the good brands offer on slower formats.

Yet, look around, and many of the “WIOTA” hard drives have five star reviews, often littered with hundreds of votes. What gives? I bought one to find out. And it isn’t pretty.

This Definitely Isn’t an M.2 SSD

I did have some difficulty procuring the 16TB portable SSD. The listing claimed it would come directly from Amazon, but instead of fast two-day shipping, my package went to the wrong state entirely and got lost for a moment. I’m not sure how the courier confused Wisconsin and Ohio. But that may have been an Amazon mistake, as the company let me know about the delay and that it turned over the package to UPS to fix the problem.

Once it arrived, I found an unassuming box with an equally unassuming hard-drive and USB-C cord inside. The box makes some grandiose claims:

• USB 3.0 Micro B to USB 3.1 Typc_c (Gen 1).
• M.2 Portable SSD
• 16 Terrabytes
• Compatible with smart TVs, Android, Windows 7, 10, and | OS.

That last one isn’t a typo; I’m really not sure what “| OS” is. The USB 3.0 Micro B has to be a mistake too; the cord inclosed is USB-A to USB-C. But regardless, with a USB C 3.1 connection to an M.2 SSD, this thing should scream.

To keep things safe, I’m only connecting this hard drive to a freshly factory reset Windows laptop that has never connected to the internet. I have a second freshly formatted flash drive with files and tools to run tests on the drive. My first test involved moving a folder with 1 gigabyte of files onto the portable hard drive. If the claims had been true, that should have taken a minute at most. It took 20 minutes.

That suggests a USB 2.0 connection, not USB 3.1. And I certainly can’t test putting 16 TBs of data on the drive at this rate. From here, the only thing to do is break out some software and test. A few additional tests didn’t reveal malware, but still better than sorry.

Definitely Not a 16 TB Drive Either

To start, I needed to confirm how large this “SSD” actually is. So I used a common tool to write data to the drive until it filled up. With a “USB 3.1” connection, that could still take a while, and with the 2.0-like speeds I expected it to take even longer.  After an hour, the test filled the hard drive with 64 GBs of data. Not tiny, but definitely not 12 TBs.

Another handy tool, ChipGenius, gave me more information. While it can’t identify the hard drive component, it did determine that the device only conforms to the USB 2.0 specification, which matches up to the speeds I’m seeing. That rule out USB 3.1 for certain. The only thing left to do is take apart the hard drive.

Not an SSD at All

It’s clear that the manuf