Gadgetory

the whole thing's a big scam I knew it all this time we've been paying hundreds of dollars for big microSD 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 micro SD 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 gonna save a fortune or maybe not but you could save a fortune with Mac well Mac well makes great underwear t-shirts socks wallets and more and they last for a long time they believed in simple shopping if you use code tech tips you'll get 20% off at the link below in all seriousness though guys I did actually buy a couple of these cards but only for the purpose of shedding some light on these fake capacity scans 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 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 what's 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 fun but it's not like they paid verbatim to rip off their logo either why can't they pirate a decent-looking front 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 and 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 and there's some claims here high-speed high-performance waterproof shockproof 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 probably our first hint and then our second hint is gonna be this EAN code down here so it's eight four three eight six oh five six three six zero one zero and if you put 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 and our card has the rip-off verbatim markings and then actually this looks the same - hmm now there's also apparently a listing for like a SanDisk USB Drive or something like that but either way it's not looking good for this card but you know what though I'm gonna keep an open mind so let's go ahead and give it a shot all right so showed up and boom look at that check this capacity out nine hundred and seventy six gigs and Anthony has actually already pre-loaded a couple 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 the corporation's look at this where it's 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 that 10 plus or is that class 10 and a free adapter best class tanana free afraid out there all right Lana you know height speed that's higher than high you know high height - um actually knows - class 10 is 10 megabytes per second sustained okay in fairness for them this is indeed ish 10 10 ish I mean not really but I'm gonna close up I see in class 10 cards that are held up yes the minimum right speed so like class 10 in 2006 I mean it must be legit right like these guys have got 93 percent positive feedback like they've actually got positive reviews here and more and they've got they've got reviews going back like a year very good seller delivers what promises best new one terabyte micro SD I'm happy with the end of my I was ordered I can recommend this seller this seems that shopping cost too high positive feedback okay buy all your codes here who that sounds legit awesome price sell are very helpful would recommend and buy all your codes here counselor door instead of have to pay more for taxes that's the negative review Anthony thinks it's over writing existing data and 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 in the 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 really I feel like I'm just watching paint dry right now I can 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 lot of thing some of them are fake every once in a while they ship for real ones so they get a positive review I don't they don't exist what is going on here okay so as we can see if you open up all the files we copy them originally there yeah cuz it's 47 points for gigs yeah and if we open up one of those files yeah go there so it didn't overwrite it so that was that's my my theory out the window and obviously we still have 920 games so all looks good right yeah yeah but these copies that we made everything you can't transfer over after 32 gigs whoa it's fake its 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 that's convenient I have one right here is this 512 Giga what are they called integral that's right and one of these is gonna run you a few hundred dollars so obviously those $30 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 leading 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 cost something so that is why they designed them to misreport he pulled the capacity thing again and it's like very convincing but how are they doing this so this gun 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 micro controller so there at least two chips even on one of these tiny little guys and that micro controller 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 micro controller acts as a go-between to fetch / 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 micro controller 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 ei encode investigation likely revealed the true nature of this beast which raises the question then I mean now that we're out our $30.00 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 owners 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 age to test W by pice high sensitivity high sir okay probably that one is by far the most useful but F three 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 gonna 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 gonna wipe it anyway if you aren't sure how much useable space you have by the way H to 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 and figuring out where it should be so we're just gonna 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 you've done in disc manager so actually it ended up being the beginning of the card I thought I was getting yeah because as it turns out the higher sector counts that were giving me the good rights yeah we're actually the beginning of the drive oh okay 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 in still 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 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 clean warranty service turns out it was a counterfeit or reject that's why we always recommend Linus brand flash memory products why does 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 they might not but what I do know for sure is that this video is brought to you by fresh books fresh books is the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work and it's a simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games and you can try it for free at FreshBooks dot-com slash tech tips just enter Linus tech tips into how you heard about us section so thanks for watching guys you just like this video you can hit that button if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out wanna buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one end our community forum which you should totally join