Rusty, getting me to do yardwork for a week on someone else's yard would involve carjacking and gunfire, so that's out. The other replies clear up for me what you meant by fake. When I see that word I think of "You order the stuff and it does not exist so you had money stolen." (What we used to call vaporware.)

As to Bud's comment, even if they are genetically modified to read as 1TB and they are only 32GB, Amazon has always been good about backing up the products sold through them. I have never lost a dime buying there, and I have done my share of returns/refunds.

The disclaimer here is that I am somewhat disinterested in this topic because I will never do what you want to do. Thus I don't understand doing all this dancing and trial by error file manipulation. Unless you live off grid in an old missile silo, why not just just plug your laptop into a wall? Where are you working that battery life is such an issue that the slight power consumption caused by intermittent powering up of an external hard drive is going to matter? Before I did all that file work I'd just buy a solar generator that will give you enough power to run your laptop and that hard drive for like 25 hours on a full charge.

Can you tell us a little more about the "why" here? I mean, you have come up with a scenario here that had never even occurred to me. A far more efficient and logical solution might be a 2TB solid state drive as a secondary mounted inside the case. I have yet to see a laptop case that didn't have room for a tiny little drive to be stuck inside it. I have a Dell 2 in 1 that I did that to. There was a spot under the motherboard where I stuck the extra SSD with 2 sided tape. Not a 2TB though by any stretch. That computer doesn't get that kind of usage because I am not a pro musician like you are. The only way I get into jazz festivals is with a ticket. So please elaborate if you care to. I am curious.