Fake Chinese SD Card Scam!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,656 words · ~13 min read
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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
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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
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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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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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the one we outlined today some of them for example might have
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half of their advertised capacity so you would have to write a lot of data to
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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
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and claim warranty service it turns out it was a counterfeit or a reject
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that's why we always recommend Linus brand flash memory products Linus brand
15:07
flash memory products are upfront about being a complete and utter scam you can
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learn more at the link in the video description we actually may or may not actually do
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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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