I've seen videos of similar situations with battery banks. In this case it was a e eternal hard drive apparently bought on Amazon. No need for further details because the title tells it all:
https://farmingdale-observer.com/2025/06/04/a-player-unscrews-his-defective-hard-drive-and-can-hardly-believe-his-eyes-inside-theres-just-a-cheap-memory-chip-glued-in-place/
06/04/2025
A player unscrews his defective hard drive and can hardly believe his eyes: inside, there’s just a cheap memory chip glued in place.
I was going to post that the weight of the device should have indicated something was wrong. Then I read the original story, and apparently the scammer added a weight inside the device to mimic a metal hard drive. Scary.
I thought this was real interesting, and to be honest for the price it doesn't concern me much, I think I might buy one.
$28 hard drive from Amazon turns out to be legit despite the price — questions about the 500GB HDD's longevity remain, though
Key excerpts from the article:
"...The UnionSine DataPocket 500GB 2.5-inch slim portable external hard drive is the item in question, which was priced at $28.28 on Amazon at the time of writing (although its regular price is $33.27). It’s also available in other sizes, which are similarly priced attractively ..
.. This puts its per GB dollar cost at about $0.03 to $0.10, unheard of pricing at these relatively small capacities. By comparison, Western Digital’s My Passport costs $65.54 for the 1TB drive and $82.99 for the 2TB one ...
When Secure Data Recovery tested the drive, the team was surprised to find that its read and write speeds worked as advertised... ...Inside the enclosure was a Toshiba MQ01ABD050V hard drive from 2016, meaning it was hosting a nine-year-old storage drive... ...given that it’s nearly a decade old, we cannot be sure how much longer it will last...
Therefore, it is possible that the company is purchasing old and used drives, refurbishing them, and then selling them on Amazon and other platforms as external storage devices.
Despite those reports, one could say that you’re getting a good value for the UnionSine hard drive, especially as it works as expected. It’s probably an okay buy if you need something cheap and quick.."