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the whole thing's a big scam i [ __ ] knew it all this time we've

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been paying hundreds of dollars for big micro sd cards but the greedy

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corporations have been hiding the good stuff from us they just pretend there's

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a difference between small ones and big ones so we'll pay more for this kind of

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cheap plastic then they unlock the functionality well

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you know what thank you ebay thank you for helping me see the

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light with this one terabyte microsd card for 32.99

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by the way guys just so that you don't have any doubt to

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prove that these are real i've actually been buying these things for all of our

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cameras we are going to save a fortune

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or maybe not you could save a fortune with matt

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weldon mac weld makes great underwear t-shirts socks wallets and more and they

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last for a long time they believe in simple shopping if you use code tech

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tips you'll get 20 off at the link below

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in all seriousness though guys i i did actually buy a couple of these cards but

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only for the purpose of shedding some light on these

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fake capacity scams and showing you how

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they work so um

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let's rip this open and take a closer look at what arrived in the mail

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so our card in particular here looks like a verbatim card on the outside down

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to even the little uh the little v logo in the corner let's get this this baby

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opened up or at least it would mostly look like it if it weren't for this like

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weird serif font here that you often find on

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cheap chinese devices which actually sorry side note here like

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if you think about it it's so ridiculous

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like obviously they weren't gonna pay

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for an expensive fawn but it's not like

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they paid verbatim to rip off their logo either why can't they pirate a decent

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looking font and then the weirdest thing is like if you look really close the

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letters are fine it's just the numbers like they didn't

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have numbers in their font pack and while we're at it why is the year on

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here chinese pirates it's like you're not even trying so moving back to our

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packaging here for a second there's some claims here high speed high performance

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waterproof shock proof

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those are pretty dubious claims and oh

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this is interesting wow that's funny so it claims 2 000

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songs in the mp3 format that's actually uh

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probably our first hint and then our second hint is going to be this ean code

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down here so it's eight six oh five six three six zero one

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zero and if we punch that into google first hit here

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is oh the plot thickens

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a 32 gig micro sdhc

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that happens to look well similar it's got the same outer

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packaging here as the one that we got but then our card

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has the ripoff verbatim markings and then actually this looks the same too

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now there's also apparently uh a listing for like a sandisk usb drive or

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something like that but either way it's not looking good for this card you know

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what though i'm gonna keep an open mind so let's go ahead and give it a shot

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alright so it showed up and boom

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look at that check this capacity out

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976 gigs and uh Anthony has actually already

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preloaded a couple of files on here just to show that it does in fact work i

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might need my tinfoil hat back after all

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it's a conspiracy it's the corporations

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look at this works just fine

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so far so let's go ahead and grab maybe a bigger file

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pop this on here oh woof

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oh that is that is not an impressive speed

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what how fast is this thing supposed to be

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i believe it says class 10 class 10.

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uh is that 10 plus or is that class 10 and

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a free adapter that's class 10 and if you have a free adapter all right

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you never know height speed that's higher than high you

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know high height height um actually no

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to class 10 is 10 megabytes per second sustained

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per second okay all right all right okay in fairness to them this is indeed

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ish 10 10-ish i mean not really but let me get a close up

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i've seen class 10 cards that are a hell of a lot faster than this

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yeah that's the minimum write speed

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so like class 10 in 2006

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i mean it must be legit right like these guys have got 93 positive

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feedback like they've actually got positive reviews here

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in morocco and they've got they've got reviews going back like a year

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very good seller delivers what promises best new one terabyte microsd i'm happy

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with the item i was ordered i can recommend this seller

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this seems that shopping cost too high

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positive feedback um

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okay buy all your codes here ooh that sounds

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legit awesome price seller very helpful would recommend buy all your codes here

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council my order instead i'd have to pay more for taxes

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that's the negative review Anthony thinks it's overwriting

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existing data and what what did i say i thought it was

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oh yeah i thought it might just be like some weird like caching thing because we

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were copying off of a network drive that clearly isn't it so okay yeah you're

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probably right then so oh crap

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and naturally the file that i copied is one that we're not going to be able to

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play back it's an mov i mean i didn't think

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okay so that works oh wow when you copy from the

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oh it's even worse

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how because we can't check these vms

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i i really like i feel like i'm just watching paint dry right now like i'm

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watching files transfer but like

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it's fascinating and i just

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i can't look away from it because

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i don't know what wizardry this is

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is this like a lotto thing

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some of them are fake every once in a while they ship a real one so they get a

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positive review

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i don't like they don't exist what is going on here

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okay so as we can see if you open up one

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of the files we copied that were originally there yeah because it's 47.4

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gigs yeah and if we open up one of those files they're still there so it wasn't

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overwritten it didn't overwrite it so that was that's my

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my theory out the window and obviously we still have uh

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you know another 920 gigs so allah looks good right yeah uh yeah

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but these copies that we made everything we can't transfer over after future gigs

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it's fake it's fake

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okay so then

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what what why

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all right so let's explain what's going on here

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the highest capacity legit micro sd card

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at the time of writing actually huh it's convenient i have one right here

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is this 512 gig from what are they called

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integral that's right and one of these is gonna run you a few hundred dollars

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so obviously those thirty dollar sd

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cards that we bought off ebay are scams

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but here's the thing if the cards arrived and they were just

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completely non-functioning plastic dummies

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or if they showed up in people's computers as 32 gigs

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well they would immediately leave negative feedback and file for a return

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through ebay's buyer protection leaving the scammers with no money for their

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effort in fact they would lose money because

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they would have had to send something like even a plastic you know

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empty junk costs something

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so that is why they designed them to misreport you pull up the capacity thing

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again and it's like very convincing

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but how are they doing this so this scam is

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as old as sd cards themselves be they full-sized ones or micro ones inside

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every sd card as you might expect is flash memory along with a

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microcontroller so there are at least two chips even on one of these tiny

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little guys and that microcontroller is really really small it manages

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communication with a host device like a pc or camera and it has information like

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the total size the physical layout the vendor id the

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product id the serial number the date of manufacture and all of this gets

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reported to the host device and the microcontroller acts as a go-between to

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fetch slash store data from the flash memory on the sd card it's not unlike an

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SSD controller in its overall functionality but it's much simpler in

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design and much lower in both power consumption and performance

139
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so then if you know how to program or that is

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reprogram the microcontroller you're able to modify

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what it reports to the host including

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the capacity and the vendor id making

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some well-made fakes these aren't particularly well made

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very difficult to identify or discover the problem with before your

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return window is up so our ean code investigation likely

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revealed the true nature of this beast which raises the question then i mean

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now that we're out our 30 dollars anyway is there a way for us to at least

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restore it to a working 32 gig model so

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we can at least get some use out of it

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in a word no in more words

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sort of actually so the card as it is will always report

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that it is one terabyte in size unless we had the expertise and the time to

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reprogram its microcontroller again but

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what we can do is we can create a small

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partition on it that we can then use normally though

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there are still some stumbling blocks that we could hit here so there are only

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a handful of factories in the world that make nand flash which means that there's

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a chance that this thing is slow but perfectly functional

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the issue is that we don't know where it came from so it could be from like a

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small chinese fab it could be from a reject bin and a legitimate one or it's

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even possible that it was produced during a so-called third shift when a

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legitimate factory that makes authorized goods starts up again at night without

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the brand owner's authorization and produces more of the same goods to sell

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out the back door often without the same degree of quality control

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so to figure out where exactly the flash is there are a

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couple of tools that we can use so there's h2 test w by

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heise hi sensor it's german please tyson

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okay probably that one is by far the most useful but f3 is an open source

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Linux alternative and HDD low level format tool by hd guru is also a pretty

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good bet now any partition creation tool that allows you to specify

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where the partition is placed on the card is going to help you do this but

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first there's a couple things you got to do you got to get anything important

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off of your fake sd card i mean it's just in general get everything off it as

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fast as you can but this whole process is going to wipe it anyway if you aren't

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sure how much usable space you have by the way h2 test w is the way to go takes

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a long time to run though so naturally we didn't run it but Anthony actually

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did some poking around figuring out where

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it should be so we're just going to kind of yolo it and make a 32 Gigabyte

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partition on the end of the card since earlier testing revealed that the

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beginning was unusable

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so how are we doing here so well actually here show them what you've done

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in disk management yeah sure so

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actually it ended up being the beginning of the card i thought it was the beginning oh yeah because as it turns

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out the higher sector counts that were giving me the um the good rights yeah

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were actually the beginning of the drive oh okay um so that's

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cool i guess we'll see if that works out and so this is just unallocated and it

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doesn't even show up in any way and this is now a 32 gig

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sd card basically i guess that leads us

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pretty tightly into our conclusion should you buy an sd card that you think

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might be fake in a word no

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in more words hell no

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instill more words yes but only for

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people that you really really don't like so be on the lookout guys for deals that

194
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look too good to be true from vendors that you don't recognize because

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remember even names that you know and trust like ebay aliexpress or even

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amazon mean nothing in cases where the brand

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00:14:21,360 --> 00:14:26,959
that's actually shipping and selling the product is not affiliated with them and

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remember these guys allow pretty much anyone to sell on their platforms and

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not every scam may even be as obvious as

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00:14:32,800 --> 00:14:39,839
the one we outlined today some of them for example might have

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00:14:37,120 --> 00:14:43,760
half of their advertised capacity so you would have to write a lot of data to

202
00:14:41,440 --> 00:14:46,959
them before you would pick up on it or they might use slower flash meaning that

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your uhs two class card wouldn't be able to

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record 4k video properly in some cases

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the capacity and the performance might even be the same but then when you go

206
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and claim warranty service it turns out it was a counterfeit or a reject

207
00:15:02,639 --> 00:15:10,079
that's why we always recommend Linus brand flash memory products Linus brand

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00:15:07,279 --> 00:15:13,199
flash memory products are upfront about being a complete and utter scam you can

209
00:15:12,079 --> 00:15:18,800
learn more at the link in the video description we actually may or may not actually do

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00:15:16,800 --> 00:15:22,320
something in collaboration with a real like flash memory vendor so

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i don't know there might be something down there that might not but what i do know for sure is that this video is

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00:15:25,199 --> 00:15:30,000
brought to you by freshbooks freshbooks is the small business accounting

213
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software custom built for how you want to work and it's a simple way to be more

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can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing

218
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games and you can try it for free at freshbooks.com tech tips just enter

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00:15:50,639 --> 00:15:55,920
Linus tech tips in the how you heard about us section so thanks for watching

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00:15:54,639 --> 00:15:59,199
guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like and subscribe or maybe consider

221
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also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally

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