Gadgetory

today we're looking at some Samsung 32 gigabyte microSD cards that a viewer sent in but they say they're 32 gigabytes and they say their Samsung except we know that they're not in reality this is a common scam and it's one that we covered a few years ago and our one terabyte USB drives scam video it's gotten so pervasive with SD cards though that even retail stores and the likes of Amazon have ended up unwittingly selling cards with illegitimate capacities and fake branding today we're looking at the micro SD card sent to our P o box by one of our viewers to see why they were sent to us before that this video is brought to you by e BJ's a new audio sound card engineered by audio note EVGA CEO knows high quality audio and has begun bringing sound cards back the new audio sound card is capable of delivering hair-raising audio superior to onboard sound the card includes a line in headphone line out and mic in and a Sony Philips digital interface new audio also leverages EBG ace PCB design experience has upgradeable op amps and uses a km premium components for its DAC and ADC learn more at the link in the description below the viewer who sent these sent a lot of them and knew that they were fake and there's more by the way we just what was nearby the reason they were sent is because they're just kind of interesting it's a really common scam except it's pulled off with such success that even a knowledgeable user like likely all of you could end up falling victim to it and it's not even for any fault of your own it's just because retail stores and e-tailers may end up accidentally occasionally selling fake SD cards and it's not because they're the ones trying to scam you it's because they two got tricked it or duped by something that's a pretty damn good fake so the way this works well we'll talk about that momentarily but the top level is that it says it's 32 gigabytes or it says it's some capacity that it isn't like the 1 terabyte USB key that we looked at years ago and in reality although it shows up as that capacity in Windows you can't actually write that amount of data to it so pretty straightforward really easy in terms of figuring out that you've been scammed pretty much immediately I'll have to do is write a large file to it so from what the viewer who sent these in to us told us to the best of our recollection it was during the stream ages ago our understanding is that one of the easiest ways to tell that this particular model is fake is because this punch out piece on the cardboard packaging is there and apparently on the fakes that's something that happens whereas on the real ones that will actually be punched out so small details like that other small details like the lack of some of the copyright or trademark symbols and areas where they would make sense to be or typically it would be on the card itself there's some low resolution imaging the actual logo appears to just be screened on there in a way that's not particularly high quality and this is stuff that Patrick looked into as well and I'm sure we'll show b-roll of him pointing out some of these things on the camera the adapter is also not particularly high quality is just a pin to pin adapter but the real problem is again it's not 32 gigabytes and the viewer knew that these were not 32 gigabytes sent them in for us to look at so some of the external signs that this is fake include the following the product code on the box doesn't match the code on the SD card which is a telltale sign that it's fake the card uses the China export logo instead of the actual seee marking and there's slight differences between those but their images online that's sure the difference will pop that on the screen it also looks like the packaging was photocopied from the actual Samsung packaging although there are some key differences like on the front of the packaging the Samsung logo is in the top left for the legitimate package with the hole punched out whereas it's in the top center for the fake product and the hole is not punched out separately the sticker code on the back of the packaging for our SD cards is for a different product than the packaging itself disclaims we're looking at MP 32 da /am for one of them while the packaging reads MP 32 da / APC these are different product SKUs the color in the samsung text on the micro SD card is in off blue whereas the legitimate color should be a great and the same is true for the bottom right microSD card text where it should be gray and the real product versus off blue in the fake when you first load the SD card into a system it'll show up in Windows as a fat32 formatted file system with 32 gigabytes of storage available this is the maximum volume size for fat32 and also there's a maximum file size of 4 gigabytes for this file system trying to write a file greater than 4 gigabytes results in a file system right error which is expected that's not because the SD card exclusively anyway that's fine though when trying to write a 3 gigabyte media files the SD card we encountered write speeds of about 5.5 5 megabytes per second to 8 megabytes per second blazing fast which is awfully low for sequential writes on a drive advertising quote ultra-fast 48 megabytes per second performance that's as bytes with the capital B and not bits in case anyone was confused although we're closer to bits performance here mega may be 64 megabits per second it still wrote to the drive though we next wrote another three and a half gigabyte file immediately encounter and a failed write it stops before the 50% point indicating that our SD card is potentially limited at somewhere between 4 to 8 gigabytes in reality although it's difficult to tell the card also stopped displaying in Windows at this point so we ejecta dit and reloaded it the SD card then reported that both files were present despite indicating a failed right but this was quickly countered by trying to play back one of the media files we were met with this colorful image and a whole lot of corruption the video playback was corrupted in various ways both audio and video and the file was incomplete this is in spite of Windows reporting that we had filled 6.4 gigabytes of space leaving 24.8 gigabytes of allegedly free space so as a user who is perhaps not privy to this type of scam you would think that the SD card should be fine although you may have encountered an error it should still work we had Patrick test a different SD card by using H to test W version 1.4 1.3 the software reported the following output and on the screen now and seems to test 16 gigabytes of data as quote ok with the remaining 15 point 2 gigabytes lost during write this drive that he tested was a different one had a bit a usable space than the one that I tested previously but it's still not 32 gigabytes of the advertised capacity it seems like they're kind of randomized it's certainly not the advertised speed at this point we knew that all of these cards were fake so it was just a matter of figuring out how it works and why and one of our previous pieces looking at scam hardware we talked about how a repurposed a 650 TI GPU was branded as a 1050 by using custom firmware we suspected something similar here custom firmware but reached out to storage expert and former storage reviewer Allen Melvin tano for assistance Allen explained the following to us he said firmware reports a false capacity typically the written lb a is roll over in an F ILO fashion in this context F ILO would be first in last overwritten Allen continued to say that typically a given flash storage device will be over provisioned slightly to allow for cells failing etc the way leveling algorithm tries to quote lap the media regardless of where the writes are addressed to it's likely the scammers just turn these configuration dials the opposite way there's no real trickery at place since the wear leveling is still doing its job but has no choice but to overwrite valid data the host address is written becomes greater than the available flash media that's just my guess but it's likely we're leveling would naturally allow for such a scam the way it typically works so it's configured in sort of a backwards fashion and it comes down to a modified firmware to what you would typically see on these and depending on the module you look at they do have part numbers on them and we were able to look them up they also some of them say 16 B in the part number which seems to correspond with the results where we saw larger capacity but still less than 32 gigabytes maybe a 16 gigabyte module or a microSD card as opposed to a 6 to 8 gigabyte one like the first one that we tested so if you look around and look up the part number you'll find some forums there's one we saw with a Polish retailer that was actually selling these unwittingly and customers had purchased them and ended up with obviously a device worse than then advertiser expected and it's not necessarily the fault of the retailer but their supplier and this is something that can happen to you on Amazon as well we've certainly seen lots of these in Street markets all around the world and so it's just it's a matter of trying to look out for some common signs like does the packaging have a low-resolution logo or does the SD card not look like the common color and branding scheme used by that manufacturer other than that just test it when you get home and by the way formatting the file system if you on this one when we tried to format from fat32 the NTFS windows just simply didn't allow it it just didn't work so that doesn't fix the problem either but anyway it's a common scam it's something we wanted you to be aware of because SD cards as they become prevalent for well more prevalent for things like phones and mainstream everyday use and no longer just used in digital photography it's it's becoming a an increasingly popular scam because more and more people who are maybe not privy to it our purchasing SD cards and this is also common by the way for USB drives so do keep an eye out for those as well but they're not only more obvious because when you go to eBay and you see a one terabyte drive for four dollars there's clearly a problem so that's it for this one also I should note be careful of plugging in things like those one terabyte drives into your computer it is possible that some of them in addition to being a scam have malware on them so if you're going to test them perhaps test them like if it's just for fun and you know it's if they test them in a system that you are okay with with reformatting and and securing once you're done because it it is possible that they are vessels for malware but these did not seem to be they were just scams so that's it that you're watching subscribe for more thank you to the viewer who sent these in we appreciate it and we do have more of the viewers hunt Hardware coming up because it's been sitting around and we have some cool ideas what to do with it so subscribe for that go to store documents XS nets pick a shirt like this one or one of our mod mats before you go to patreon.com/scishow stew the latest behind the scenes video I'll see you all next time