On counterfeit SD cards

[pine.tree]

Well I am looking at new Micro SD 128g I need one for my tablet/phone/and now PINE64  [no i dont NEED that much space but as a nerd I WANT it]

Hey, maybe if you're feeling charitable you could host a torrentbox and seed large files. You know, raw Linux distros

[ab1jx]

I have nothing but good things to say about buying them from B&H Photo, I've also bought some  from Adorama Camera.  A 128 GB High Endurance is $26, I have half a dozen or so but I keep buying more computers.  All of them still work fine, the oldest is a couple years old (64 GB).  High Endurance refers to frequent writes, these were originally meant for video surveilance cameras where they're constantly being written to then overwritten.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1...s=pi&pim=Y

256 GB is $55, I haven't tried one of those yet.

This makes a difference.  
  sdauth.png (Size: 5.64 KB / Downloads: 594)   I've returned lesser Sandisk SD cards for replacement and by them B&H and Adorama are both legit places to buy from .

[bcnaz]

 1) I really do not think your odds of getting a counterfeit card from EBay are any more likely than from Amazon,

    Just because you 'Like' them does not improve their odds !

2)  The camera shops may improve your odds from the start, but some may be better than others at replacing
      a counterfeit when you do find one.

3)   'Places like'   NewEgg can vary, especially in their 'Market Place' 
  >  but NewEgg is fairly good about replacing  Defective items.

  I have seen only a little Testing software,  Testing a 2TB drive could take you Days
    I have not seen any fast testing software for the really big drives.

  IF you really want a large drive you should run the test(s) as soon as possible, there are obviously more testing software
  programs for Windoze, but there are a few in Linux.
 You will have a much harder time getting it replaced/exchanged/refunded if you wait,  "I bought this last year it's no-good"  !

 >  If it "Sounds too good"  to be true,  It Most likely is a fraud...

   Use your 'Common Sense'  that will 'improve' your odds, and test ASAP ! and Deal with places that will exchange or refund
    defective merchandise.

   These days even a reputable seller may come across these drives,
           but they will be eager to keep their good name.

---

Common Sense is likely your best Defense.,

Expensive does not guarantee it is legit.

Cheap does not guarantee it is a fraud, but, maybe suspicious. ?

Do Not rely on short reviews such as : "Works Great" just because it 'Works' does not mean has been tested to compacity.

Flash Cards and Flash Sticks seem to be the most common, not seen as much in the other drives, but it can be others as well

( NOTE : This Post is strictly My Opinion, from my personal experience, I am not in the 'Sales' Profession )

[zaius]

I test all my SD cards with F3.

https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[ZuzanOlszew]

I have nothing but good things to say about buying them from B&H Photo, I've also bought some  from Adorama Camera.  A 128 GB High Endurance is $26, I have half a dozen or so but I keep buying more computers.  All of them still work fine, the oldest is a couple years old (64 GB).  High Endurance refers to frequent writes, these were originally meant for video surveilance cameras where they're constantly being written to then overwritten.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1466563-REG/sandisk_ruletka_sdsqqnr_128g_an6ia_high_endurance_microsd_128gb.html?sts=pi&pim=Y

256 GB is $55, I haven't tried one of those yet.

This makes a difference.    I've returned lesser Sandisk SD cards for replacement and by them B&H and Adorama are both legit places to buy from .

I believe that the brand is of course of high quality. But sometimes ordinary non-branded things are much better than the known ones. This also applies to memory cards.

[diodelass]

This might be a bit hazardous to say, but in my experience with buying cheap flash devices from questionable sources (eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress), I've had remarkably good luck. In fact, in around 20 total devices, I have never received a fake. I thought I did once, when I got a 32-gigabyte pendrive for around $20 that didn't enumerate, but it turned out the flash was good - it just had a really janky USB connector that didn't really work in almost any of my computers. Rules I've followed that appear to work:

1. Avoid comically large capacities. 16-gigabyte cards are probably fine, because 16 gigabytes of flash is so cheap that it's probably not worth faking it. Meanwhile, I'd be surprised if the majority of 1-terabyte cards were legit. I usually don't consider anything above 32 gigabytes, as a general rule - both to avoid fakes, and also just because I don't like investing tens of dollars in a chip that's smaller than my fingernail and might easily get lost in my absurdly messy shop.

2. On sites like Amazon and AliExpress (which I really believe to be about comparable in overall trustworthiness, despite typical American opinions about "cheap Chinese crap" - most of it comes from China either way), it's really not worth sifting the list to find the lowest price. It's much better to find a seller that has a brand name, a lot of listings that have stayed up for a long time, and a lot of customer reviews with relatively even distributions in time. The usual scam techniques are to put up a burner storefront that only lasts long enough to make a few sales (and possibly pads its own reviews with bots, but I haven't actually seen this), then disappears before it can be killed by the reviews.

3. Don't get distracted by high numerical spec-to-cost ratios, just in general. You don't want the item with the best advertised specs, nor do you want the one with the lowest price. Look for something with perfectly average specifications and a price similar to what other sellers are offering, and get that. I know how hard it can be to convince yourself of this, if you've spent a lot of time comparing things in brick-and-mortar department stores, but I'm serious here: just try to hit the center of the bell curve and ignore the tantalizing tails. If a product doesn't look that exciting, that's probably because it's being advertised more honestly than the ones that do. This is increasingly true in a tech market like the one we have now, where the growth speed is starting to slow down a little bit and the playing field between competing vendors is starting to level.

The only fake flash devices I've ever encountered have been little promotional flash drives I got as freebies at a parks department event near here. They claimed to be 4GB by their casing markings, but the partition table onboard had been hacked to claim it was several hundred terabytes (which I can only assume was a mistake on the counterfeiters' part). The actual capacity, visible once the partition table was wiped clean and properly recreated, was 4 kilobytes. I think I got relatively lucky here, since they're still actually viable, if very small, flash devices - had they been the firmware-hacked variety that report a false capacity at a deeper level, they'd be impossible to use safely without hacking the firmware back into line.


Addition: It's also worth noting that smaller cards are less likely to be fakes because they're easier to test.
A testing a 16-gigabyte card requires 16 gigabytes of test data, which is relatively easy to generate and handle. Testing a 1-terabyte card requires one terabyte of test data, which is rather a lot, and most people won't have the free storage space (I know I don't) or the time to complete a proper test. When you can identify a fake in a few minutes with your laptop, it's much harder to get away with shenanigans compared to when it takes hours and a proper workstation.

[zer0sig]

Addition: It's also worth noting that smaller cards are less likely to be fakes because they're easier to test.
A testing a 16-gigabyte card requires 16 gigabytes of test data, which is relatively easy to generate and handle. Testing a 1-terabyte card requires one terabyte of test data, which is rather a lot, and most people won't have the free storage space (I know I don't) or the time to complete a proper test. When you can identify a fake in a few minutes with your laptop, it's much harder to get away with shenanigans compared to when it takes hours and a proper workstation.

I've generally had good luck with SDs but we built a server at work on an SD card (so we could dedicate disk arrays for data/NAS) and it failed. Card felt weird and flexy and looks different from another. We have a few more servers running these cards without a hiccup, so it looks like just one made it through. And it was from Amazon, and I believe from a reputable seller or maybe straight from either Amazon/Sandisk. When it failed, it wasn't readable at all.

Note that if you have a Linux/Unix type machine with a command line, there are various checks you can do that don't require very large files. dd is one and is standard on every Unix type system I can think of (not certain whether it is stock in Mac OS/X but I'm pretty cerrtain it's available), and there are some specific utilities for this sort of thing. Check out this link: https://askubuntu.com/questions/737473/c...humb-drive

[DrYak]

I test all my SD cards with F3.

https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

I second that!

- If you got your card from a place where everyone can create an acount and sell (eBay, AliExpress, Wish, Bangood, Amazon, etc.) and/or which practice comingling and will auto-switch your order to whomever rando says they still have it on stock (Amazon) , it's a great tool to detect fraud.
And force a reimbursement out of the platform / file a complain through your credit card company.

- If you get a genuine brand card, from an actual retail (A physical shop. The online branch of a physical shop. An online-only retail but who actually take their supply chain as seriously as a physical shop and get their deliveries from an actual provider, and not from whichever shipping container was the cheapest on AliBaba) this would be a good way to spot a production error and still get it replaced under the manufacturer's warranty.
That's extremely rare nowadays as manufacturing quality is quite high and quality test performed before packaging should spot most errors, but could still happen once every blue moon.

[Luterman]

As long as you don't buy an SD card, you won't encounter counterfeit ones. I have abandoned SD cards now, and all use portable hard drives.

[barray]

2 cents: Something nice I saw Lubuntu do recently during an install was checking that the squashfs was not corrupted and matched the relevant hashes. Although a seemingly small thing, imagine how many man-hours this feature has saved! I think all the Pine distros could consider such a first-time verification step to save headaches.

Recently I found that of two identical memory sticks purchased from exactly the same place at exactly the same time, one was fake, one was not. I suspect some of these really low-margin suppliers mix in legit and non-legit devices to tip the reviews in their favour. If only 10% of people complain about it not working, they can even likely get these reviews mostly removed.

A little plug: I think this is why Pine should look into creating their own storage mediums: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13301