The whole thing's a big scam!
I *bleeping*(f**king) 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 and 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!
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[Intro Music]
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 font!
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 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 a...
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 GB 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 -
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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 - 976 GB
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 works 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
- I believe it says class 10 - Class 10
That 10 plus or is that class 10 and a free adapter - That's class ten and a free adapter out there. and a free adaptor. All right *some strange noise from linus*
Tight speed that's higher than high
You know high height-height-height
um actually no - class 10 is 10 megabytes per second sustained
is the minimum
10 megabytes per second?
Yes Okay Alright Alright
Okay sure, in fairness to them this is indeed ish ten tenish, I mean not really but I'm gonna close up
I've See in class 10 cards that are held up a lot faster *laughs*
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...
uuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmm
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-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
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 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
uhhhhhhhh you know there
920 gigs so all looks good, right? Yeah. Yeah, but these copies that we made everything you can't transfer over after 32 gigs
*sound effect by a human* 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 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 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
heise
Heise 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
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