Latest scam - SD memory cards

How about cassettes for my Commodore VIC-20 memory drive?
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T_C said:
In the last decade I have not heard of this.
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It was a popular scam years ago, so much so that I stopped buying SD cards online.

Back then, the scammers weren't lazy either - often the lower level filesystem had been edited so that even on a computer it looked like it had the right size capacity. But try writing beyond the 1st gb, and whoops, write error, file system not addressable...
 
ad.hom said:
It was a popular scam years ago, so much so that I stopped buying SD cards online.

Back then, the scammers weren't lazy either - often the lower level filesystem had been edited so that even on a computer it looked like it had the right size capacity. But try writing beyond the 1st gb, and whoops, write error, file system not addressable...
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So, it sounds like the best test is to load it up, then delete the test load.
 
Larry Fine said:
So, it sounds like the best test is to load it up, then delete the test load.
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That would be an easy and quick test and will not require any special software.
There are other "fake" categories, such as "reduced performance", fake brand, and believe it or not, some SD "cards" are nothing more than a rectangular piece of plastic !! So, "never buy online" is one's best bet.
 
ST1100Y said:
Old news... I'm genuinely suspicious of low price offers... rather stick to brands, less headache... (whilst I did have a 164GB SanDisk in my phone that fried after >1 year...)
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About how much money did that tiny piece of SanDisk plastic cost you?
 
caldercay said:
That would be an easy and quick test and will not require any special software.
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How does the following sound for testing a micro SD card?

Format the card in my Android telephone. Set the photo resolution of the phone to maximum. Start recording video and wait until the card fills up. Check the size of the video file; then delete it.

That test may not detect a slow card but should detect a low capacity card, no?

(And if I later wanted to record video, I would be able to estimate how long the video could be.)

By the way, I currently don't buy cards over 32 gigabytes.
 
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DaveWooster said:
How does the following sound for testing a micro SD card?

Format the card in my Android telephone. Set the photo resolution of the phone to maximum. Start recording video and wait until the card fills up. Check the size of the video file; then delete it.

That test may not detect a slow card but should detect a low capacity card, no?

(And if I later wanted to record video, I would be able to estimate how long the video could be.)
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Absolutely correct!
 
DaveWooster said:
How does the following sound for testing a micro SD card?

Format the card in my Android telephone. Set the photo resolution of the phone to maximum. Start recording video and wait until the card fills up. Check the size of the video file; then delete it.
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Yeah and you would fall victim to the scam.

The phone will think it has a bigger capacity card then it does, it'll keep recording until it's told it filled up the card. It'll look like you did, the file will be listed as there and at the maximum size but the file will be corrupted. Once the card runs out of space on the actual memory chips it just sends the 1s & 0s to null... gone forever. The directory structure does exist and you can navigate it, but the index is pointing to a memory value space that does not exist inside the little plastic case that makes up your memory card.

You are on the right track.

Make a few huge recordings and then go back and see if you can play them until the end. Or just copy some huge movie files and change the name by a digit. Then try to watch a bit of the last one.

This is what the test program does, writes consecutive 1gb files until the card says full (or it hits the limit you told it) and then reads them back for verification.
 
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T_C said:
My fake 512gb card would have z directory structure showing 512gb of files but only 14.9gb of them were actually there and not corrupted.
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Ah, the joys of the file allocation table. You're entirely correct.

For everyone else, I'm sure you've heard the phase "Trust, but verify" - verify that the files you're testing with aren't corrupt (no need to watch a full movie etc, you can skip through sections of it).
 
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