“$12 for a 64GB flash drive?! Send me 20!” 

Cheap thumb drives and hard drives off of Ebay and from street vendors can often be of dubious quantity and quality, even if they claim to work when you plug them into your computer. H2testw is a program that one ups their sneaky games by verifying your new drive’s storage space.

What is it and what does it do

H2testw runs through a simple process to determine whether a thumb drive has the capacity it claims to have. It just writes data to the drive until it fills it to the brim, and then verifies the data is still alive. If it still exists, the drive is good. If it’s mysteriously disappeared, you may want to look into getting a new drive.

Pros

• Can determine whether drives lie about their capacity
• Relatively fast
• Offered in both German and English

Cons

• Does not automatically delete test files
• To fully work, requires you to delete all files

Cheap thumbdrives bought on sites like Ebay and at cheap street vendors are often of the type that are not actually of a high storage, but are instead faking it by cycling through as the computer writes to the drive. While evil, this has the potential for being very easy to detect: just fill up the drive and read the data off of it. If it can read it, you’re good–but if it can’t, your drive might be a fake.

When using H2testw, be sure to free up as much space as possible on the drive. The larger amount free, the better H2testw will be at detecting the fake drives. After starting, it begins a 5-10 minute process in which it simply writes data to the drives. At the end of the process, it reads it back. If the data matches up, the drive is indeed legitimate, but if it doesn’t, the drive is either losing data or counterfeit.

The proper appearance of an H2testw window is shown to the right. You’ll notice that, while I had only around two thirds of my space free, the entire test passed without errors. This is a strong indication my drive is indeed legitimate.

Conclusion and download link

Ebay users around the world know that you need to be 100% sure of the quality of the goods you’re buying. If you bought a USB drive and think you might have been scammed, it’s important to know for certain whether you really were. H2testw is the perfect program for that, and could potentially save you from repeating a possible costly mistake.

Price: Free! 

Version reviewed: v1.4

Supported OS: Windows 2000+

Download size: 213KB

VirusTotal malware scan results: 0/42

Portability: No installation required!

H2testw homepage (German) | Google Translate | Softpedia page