Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The drive was provided for review purposes. I do not recommend this product. I cannot recommend any of the merchants who sell this product. And I cannot even recommend Amazon for purchasing this type of product. The "512gb" advertisement is fraud. WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON???...MY COMPUTER SAYS 512GB, BUT THE DRIVE IS NOT FUNCTIONING CORRECTLY??? This is not a 512gb flash drive...in fact, while a few 512GB flash drives do exist, the going rate is starting around $300. If your computer shows the size of this drive as being 512gb, the drive has been "tricked" into displaying this inflated number. A Seller hacks the firmware code of the USB flash drive so that the drive is "tricked" into showing a size of 512gb, despite the fact that the drive's actual capacity is a fraction of this (in some cases less than 1% of the advertised size). The reason this drive is so slow is due to terrible quality flash memory, and the hacked firmware. In other words, use this drive and data loss is all but certain. HOW DO I AVOID GETTING SCAMMED??? HOW DO I DETECT THESE SCAM FLASH DRIVES AND SD CARDS??? DOES AMAZON FULFILLMENT GUARANTEE A LEGITIMATE PRODUCT??? With any flash media purchased on Amazon (USB flash drives, SD cards, Solid State Drives, etc.), be VERY weary because there are TONS of fake products, many of which come from Amazon through their Fulfilled-by-Amazon program. Upon receiving the drive, you should manually verify that the drive is indeed what is advertised. You can use a free program like H2TestW, which tests drives by first writing X amount of data to the drive, and then verifying that X amount of data still remains after the drive is filled (with X being the advertised size of the flash drive or SD card.) If the card is a fake, when H2TestW attempts to read that 256gb of data written, but only gets back 4gb, it will alert you that your flash drive or memory card is a scam product. These fraudulent Sellers have no way of tricking this process. Additionally, perform several checks on the health of the media (using OS X's Disk Utility or Windows' DiskCheck), and if this is a solid state drive (or a hard disk drive for that matter), manually review the S.M.A.R.T. data (with a free program like Crystal DiskInfo) because it will show you whether or not the product you purchased is actually new because it logs usage statistics. IF THE DRIVE HAS GOOD REVIEWS, DOES THAT MEAN IT IS A LEGIT PRODUCT??? Finally, while Amazon User Reviews can be of great benefit, there appears to be cause for concern here as well. It appears that many Sellers of these fraudulent flash drives and SD cards send boatloads of these fake products out to ranked Amazon Reviewers, and in many cases will get a positive review even if the product they sent is total garbage. It also appears that some Sellers go as far to create Amazon User Accounts and then publish a positive review on their own junk product to give it a higher rating than it deserves. So while Amazon reviews are certainly beneficial, there are limitations and this particular type of product seems very prone to abuse. So, FWIW, if you are going to purchase this type of product on Amazon, regardless of who the Seller is, you should take several of the above steps to verify that the product you spent your hard-earned money on is indeed what was promised to you in the item's listing. YMMV.