the whole thing's a big scam i [ __ ] knew it all this time we've
been paying hundreds of dollars for big micro sd cards but the greedy
corporations have been hiding the good stuff from us they just pretend there's
a difference between small ones and big ones so we'll pay more for this kind of
cheap plastic then they unlock the functionality well
you know what thank you ebay thank you for helping me see the
light with this one terabyte microsd card for 32.99
by the way guys just so that you don't have any doubt to
prove that these are real i've actually been buying these things for all of our
cameras we are going to save a fortune
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in all seriousness though guys i i did actually buy a couple of these cards but
only for the purpose of shedding some light on these
fake capacity scams and showing you how
they work so um
let's rip this open and take a closer look at what arrived in the mail
so our card in particular here looks like a verbatim card on the outside down
to even the little uh the little v logo in the corner let's get this this baby
opened up or at least it would mostly look like it if it weren't for this like
weird serif font here that you often find on
cheap chinese devices which actually sorry side note here like
if you think about it it's so ridiculous
like obviously they weren't gonna pay
for an expensive fawn but it's not like
they paid verbatim to rip off their logo either why can't they pirate a decent
looking font and then the weirdest thing is like if you look really close the
letters are fine it's just the numbers like they didn't
have numbers in their font pack and while we're at it why is the year on
here chinese pirates it's like you're not even trying so moving back to our
packaging here for a second there's some claims here high speed high performance
waterproof shock proof
those are pretty dubious claims and oh
this is interesting wow that's funny so it claims 2 000
songs in the mp3 format that's actually uh
probably our first hint and then our second hint is going to be this ean code
down here so it's eight six oh five six three six zero one
zero and if we punch that into google first hit here
is oh the plot thickens
a 32 gig micro sdhc
that happens to look well similar it's got the same outer
packaging here as the one that we got but then our card
has the ripoff verbatim markings and then actually this looks the same too
now there's also apparently uh a listing for like a sandisk usb drive or
something like that but either way it's not looking good for this card you know
what though i'm gonna keep an open mind so let's go ahead and give it a shot
alright so it showed up and boom
look at that check this capacity out
976 gigs and uh Anthony has actually already
preloaded a couple of files on here just to show that it does in fact work i
might need my tinfoil hat back after all
it's a conspiracy it's the corporations
look at this works just fine
so far so let's go ahead and grab maybe a bigger file
pop this on here oh woof
oh that is that is not an impressive speed
what how fast is this thing supposed to be
i believe it says class 10 class 10.
uh is that 10 plus or is that class 10 and
a free adapter that's class 10 and if you have a free adapter all right
you never know height speed that's higher than high you
know high height height um actually no
to class 10 is 10 megabytes per second sustained
per second okay all right all right okay in fairness to them this is indeed
ish 10 10-ish i mean not really but let me get a close up
i've seen class 10 cards that are a hell of a lot faster than this
yeah that's the minimum write speed
so like class 10 in 2006
i mean it must be legit right like these guys have got 93 positive
feedback like they've actually got positive reviews here
in morocco and they've got they've got reviews going back like a year
very good seller delivers what promises best new one terabyte microsd i'm happy
with the item i was ordered i can recommend this seller
this seems that shopping cost too high
positive feedback um
okay buy all your codes here ooh that sounds
legit awesome price seller very helpful would recommend buy all your codes here
council my order instead i'd have to pay more for taxes
that's the negative review Anthony thinks it's overwriting
existing data and what what did i say i thought it was
oh yeah i thought it might just be like some weird like caching thing because we
were copying off of a network drive that clearly isn't it so okay yeah you're
probably right then so oh crap
and naturally the file that i copied is one that we're not going to be able to
play back it's an mov i mean i didn't think
okay so that works oh wow when you copy from the
oh it's even worse
how because we can't check these vms
i i really like i feel like i'm just watching paint dry right now like i'm
watching files transfer but like
it's fascinating and i just
i can't look away from it because
i don't know what wizardry this is
is this like a lotto thing
some of them are fake every once in a while they ship a real one so they get a
positive review
i don't like they don't exist what is going on here
okay so as we can see if you open up one
of the files we copied that were originally there yeah because it's 47.4
gigs yeah and if we open up one of those files they're still there so it wasn't
overwritten it didn't overwrite it so that was that's my
my theory out the window and obviously we still have uh
you know another 920 gigs so allah looks good right yeah uh yeah
but these copies that we made everything we can't transfer over after future gigs
it's fake it's fake
okay so then
what what why
all right so let's explain what's going on here
the highest capacity legit micro sd card
at the time of writing actually huh it's convenient i have one right here
is this 512 gig from what are they called
integral that's right and one of these is gonna run you a few hundred dollars
so obviously those thirty dollar sd
cards that we bought off ebay are scams
but here's the thing if the cards arrived and they were just
completely non-functioning plastic dummies
or if they showed up in people's computers as 32 gigs
well they would immediately leave negative feedback and file for a return
through ebay's buyer protection leaving the scammers with no money for their
effort in fact they would lose money because
they would have had to send something like even a plastic you know
empty junk costs something
so that is why they designed them to misreport you pull up the capacity thing
again and it's like very convincing
but how are they doing this so this scam is
as old as sd cards themselves be they full-sized ones or micro ones inside
every sd card as you might expect is flash memory along with a
microcontroller so there are at least two chips even on one of these tiny
little guys and that microcontroller is really really small it manages
communication with a host device like a pc or camera and it has information like
the total size the physical layout the vendor id the
product id the serial number the date of manufacture and all of this gets
reported to the host device and the microcontroller acts as a go-between to
fetch slash store data from the flash memory on the sd card it's not unlike an
SSD controller in its overall functionality but it's much simpler in
design and much lower in both power consumption and performance
so then if you know how to program or that is
reprogram the microcontroller you're able to modify
what it reports to the host including
the capacity and the vendor id making
some well-made fakes these aren't particularly well made
very difficult to identify or discover the problem with before your
return window is up so our ean code investigation likely
revealed the true nature of this beast which raises the question then i mean
now that we're out our 30 dollars anyway is there a way for us to at least
restore it to a working 32 gig model so
we can at least get some use out of it
in a word no in more words
sort of actually so the card as it is will always report
that it is one terabyte in size unless we had the expertise and the time to
reprogram its microcontroller again but
what we can do is we can create a small
partition on it that we can then use normally though
there are still some stumbling blocks that we could hit here so there are only
a handful of factories in the world that make nand flash which means that there's
a chance that this thing is slow but perfectly functional
the issue is that we don't know where it came from so it could be from like a
small chinese fab it could be from a reject bin and a legitimate one or it's
even possible that it was produced during a so-called third shift when a
legitimate factory that makes authorized goods starts up again at night without
the brand owner's authorization and produces more of the same goods to sell
out the back door often without the same degree of quality control
so to figure out where exactly the flash is there are a
couple of tools that we can use so there's h2 test w by
heise hi sensor it's german please tyson
okay probably that one is by far the most useful but f3 is an open source
Linux alternative and HDD low level format tool by hd guru is also a pretty
good bet now any partition creation tool that allows you to specify
where the partition is placed on the card is going to help you do this but
first there's a couple things you got to do you got to get anything important
off of your fake sd card i mean it's just in general get everything off it as
fast as you can but this whole process is going to wipe it anyway if you aren't
sure how much usable space you have by the way h2 test w is the way to go takes
a long time to run though so naturally we didn't run it but Anthony actually
did some poking around figuring out where
it should be so we're just going to kind of yolo it and make a 32 Gigabyte
partition on the end of the card since earlier testing revealed that the
beginning was unusable
so how are we doing here so well actually here show them what you've done
in disk management yeah sure so
actually it ended up being the beginning of the card i thought it was the beginning oh yeah because as it turns
out the higher sector counts that were giving me the um the good rights yeah
were actually the beginning of the drive oh okay um so that's
cool i guess we'll see if that works out and so this is just unallocated and it
doesn't even show up in any way and this is now a 32 gig
sd card basically i guess that leads us
pretty tightly into our conclusion should you buy an sd card that you think
might be fake in a word no
in more words hell no
instill more words yes but only for
people that you really really don't like so be on the lookout guys for deals that
look too good to be true from vendors that you don't recognize because
remember even names that you know and trust like ebay aliexpress or even
amazon mean nothing in cases where the brand
that's actually shipping and selling the product is not affiliated with them and
remember these guys allow pretty much anyone to sell on their platforms and
not every scam may even be as obvious as
the one we outlined today some of them for example might have
half of their advertised capacity so you would have to write a lot of data to
them before you would pick up on it or they might use slower flash meaning that
your uhs two class card wouldn't be able to
record 4k video properly in some cases
the capacity and the performance might even be the same but then when you go
and claim warranty service it turns out it was a counterfeit or a reject
that's why we always recommend Linus brand flash memory products Linus brand
flash memory products are upfront about being a complete and utter scam you can
learn more at the link in the video description we actually may or may not actually do
something in collaboration with a real like flash memory vendor so
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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