WD investigating origins of fake drives in UK channel WD is no nearer to finding the origins of a batch of counterfeit internal hard drives a year after they found their way into the UK channel, despite the intervention of US authorities. The 130 fake Velociraptor drives emerged last Summer when distie KMS Components bought the drives from Aria and sold them to a customer who …
I used to work in it. Aria are a reseller. KMS, if you want to label it, is a broker. I used to sell them disks back when I did that stuff. The firms I was at were what I'd call a distributor (Northamber/Bell Microproducts). If the channel is anything like I remember it, this story is fairly small potatoes.
What level does the counterfeiting run to?
Presumably these are a different kind of drive that has been relabelled most likely drives that have failed some kind of test; that would be easy enough to do. The thing that is going to be harder to do is change the firmware on the drive so that it reports the correct model number. If that has been done then it's an impressive forgery, however if the counterfeiters are clever enough to perform this feat then you'd think they'd also be clever enough to spell the name correctly on the label.
Of course you have to ask what the warranty situation is on these drives, I would guess that WD would expect their drives to be imported through official channels and probably don't expect them to be hoping across the Atlantic.
If they ever crack the spelling, we're toast. It used to be dodgy typefaces, stickers, serial numbers etc but increasingly the fakers have got these nailed - even the print quality on labels/packaging is good. The only thing that seems to be left is dodgy spelling, and even that's on flaky ground with the increasing number of muppets in legit businesses unable to use a spellchecker.
Doomed man, we're all doomed.
I got some Kingston USB flash drives...perfect packaging, and the drives were identical. Issue was they were all coming up with 2-4GB randomly changing sizes (were meant to be 16GB's). Being curious looked up the chips in them and yep, totally dodgy knock off's which soon made there way into the bin. But lesson learned stick to the big disties in the channel. The smaller cheaper ones usually tend to have a reason for it. But that said they were perfect looking fakes down to the correct barcodes for the product and the card and finish on the packaging. Was quite impressed how well they were done.
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