Data-recovery firm tests $28, 500GB HDD from Amazon and gets surprising results

Fraudulent or misleading storage devices are, unfortunately, still easy to find via online marketplaces. It's also a common story that someone buys a shockingly cheap storage device from an unknown brand and ends up with a product that doesn’t perform as expected—or at all. With this in mind, data-recovery firm Secure Data Recovery recently bought a 500GB HDD from Amazon (the UnionSine HD2510) for $28 and tested it. The results were better than expected, but there are still reasons to avoid buying something like that. Testing Kirill Rymko, director of lab operations at Secure Data Recovery, told Ars Technica that his company decided to buy and test UnionSine’s 500GB external HDD due to its low price-per-GB. As of this writing, the 2.5-inch drive costs $28.28 on Amazon, or about $0.06 per GB. Rymko said: We had a feeling that the drive was potentially refurbished at that price point. Also, [storage scams happen] often, especially with sellers on Amazon. We have received, in the past, hard drives and flash drives that customers purchased and sent to us for data recovery which are fake or use different components to appear as if they hold a certain amount of GB. Rymko also pointed to a scheme where flash drives placed inside larger chassis are falsely sold as SSDs or HDDs. Here at Ars, we’ve also covered the sales of 64GB microSD cards fraudulently sold as 16TB and 30TB SSDs. However, UnionSine’s drive mostly delivered on its performance claims. Secure Data Recovery found that read and write speeds were decent for an older, 5,400 RPM drive, synthetic speeds matched the description, and the drive’s internal condition was fine. Rymko said that Secure Data Recovery was “surprised by the results” and that the drive’s Hard Disk Sentinel results, which are closer to real-world performance, were worse than what UnionSine advertised, “but this is typical for these products.” Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Secure Data Recovery Upon opening the HDD’s enclosure, Secure Data Recovery found a Toshiba MQ01ABD050V from 2016. Considering that only a few brands still manufacture HDDs, this wasn’t too surprising. It is more surprising that the drive inside was 9 years old.