The data on the web (content, images, graphics, videos etc) has surpassed all levels. The ever-increasing data is increasing exponentially every second and now we have Big Data!

This is just the beginning of data revolution which will change our businesses and our lives altogether. According to a report by Forbes, there is an explosion of data and more data is created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. By 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet.

There is a massive growth in video and photo data, where every minute up to 300 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube. By the end of 2017, nearly 80% of photos will be taken on smartphones.

The mass increase in data invariably means that the storage devices have to be extremely efficient in order to store this avalanche of unlimited data and for backing up purposes.

There is no dearth of storage devices like USB drives, flash drives, hard drives in the market for storing and backing up data. But beware, there are numerous cases of fake storage drives and devices in the market.

Loss of important data and files is a big loss especially when you have not stored it anywhere else. Imagine, you saved a very important file in your drive and when you needed it, it wasn’t there. Feels like a nightmare?

Well, we are not here to scare you but to educate you to be very cautious while purchasing your storage device the next time. We bring you some important tips to keep in mind while purchasing a hard drive.

The Feeling of Spinning Vibration– The portable hard disk drives comes with a real 2.5-inch IDE/SATA hard disk drive fitted inside them. There is also circuit board that acts as a USB to IDE interface controller.

When an original portable disk drive is connected to the computer or a USB power source, it starts spinning and one can feel the vibration of spinning by placing a hand on the disk drive. One can also hear the spinning of the drive by bringing ears close to the drive. Since there are no mechanical moving parts in fake hard drives, one cannot hear any spinning or feel any vibration.

Check the Device Manager– Connect the portable hard drive to Windows PC, and open the device manager (Win+R, type devmgmt.msc, press Enter) and check for the device name. The device name should match the portable drive brand.

You would not see anything or will see something else in case of the fake drives.

Format the Portable Drive– The common practice of counterfeiters is that they modify the file table of the fake portable drives to make it look like a large size disk like 2 TB while it is only a few megabytes flash disk in reality.

To identify this and reveal the real size of the drive, format the disk drive in Windows using the FAT32 file system and it will reset the file table to reveal the true disk size of the portable drive.

These are few simple methods that will help you spot a fake portable external hard drive. We urge you to stay away from fake or counterfeited products by shopping only from reputed showrooms and online shopping websites