 The whole thing's a big scam. I f***ing knew it. All this time we've been paying hundreds of dollars for big micro SD 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 can save a fortune with Mack Weldon. Mack Weldon makes great underwear, t-shirts, socks, wallets, and more, and they last for a long time. They believe 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 scams and showing you how they work. So 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 V logo in the corner. Let's get this baby opened up. Or at least it would mostly look like it if it weren't for this weird serif font here that you often find on cheap Chinese devices. Which actually, sorry, side note here, if you think about it, it's so ridiculous. 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, 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 843-8605-636-010. And if we punch 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 our card has the ripoff verbatim markings. And then actually this looks the same too. 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. You know what though? I'm gonna keep an open mind. So let's go ahead and give it a shot. All right. So it showed up and boom! Look at that! Check this capacity out. 976 gigs. And Anthony has actually already preloaded 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! It's the corporations! Look at this. Works just fine. So far. So let's go ahead and grab maybe a bigger file. Pop this on here. Oh, woof. Oh, that is not an impressive speed. What? How fast is this thing supposed to be? I believe it says class 10. Class 10. Is that 10 plus or is that class 10 and a free adapter? That's class 10 and a free adapter. All right. I don't know. You never know. Height, speed. That's higher than high, you know? Height, height, height. Actually, no. Class 10 is 10 megabytes per second sustained. 10 megabytes per second? Okay. All right. All right. In fairness to them, this is indeed ish 10, 10 ish. Well, I mean, not really. But. I've seen class 10 cards that are a hell of a lot faster than this. Yeah, that's the minimum write speed. So like class 10 in 2000 and what, six? I mean, it must be legit, right? Like these guys have got 93% positive feedback. Like they've actually got positive reviews here. In Morocco. And 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 item I was ordered. I can recommend this seller. This seems, that shopping cost too high. Positive feedback. Okay. Buy all your codes here. Oh, that sounds legit. Awesome price. Seller very helpful. Would recommend. Buy all your codes here. Counts in my order and said I'd have to pay more for taxes. That's the negative review. Anthony thinks it's overwriting 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 of a 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 like I feel like I'm just watching paint dry right now. Like I'm 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 lotto thing? Some of them are fake. Every once in a while, they ship a real one. So they get a positive review. I don't like they don't exist. What is going on here? Okay, so as we can see if you open up one of the files we copied, what's the original either? Yeah, because it's 47.4 gigs for gigs. Yeah, and if we open up one of those files, they're still there. So it wasn't overwritten. It didn't overwrite it. So that was that's my my theory out the window. And obviously we still have, you know, another 920 gigs. So all looks good, right? Yeah. Yeah, but these copies that we made everything we can't transfer it over after 32 gigs. It's fake. It's fake. Okay, so then 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, it's convenient. I have one right here is this 512 giga from what are they called integral? That's right. And one of these is going to 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 protection, leaving 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. Can you pull up 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 microcontroller. So there are at least two chips, even on one of these tiny little guys. And that microcontroller 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 microcontroller acts as a go-between to fetch slash 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 microcontroller, 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 EAN code investigation likely revealed the true nature of this beast, which raises the question then, I mean, now that we're out our $30 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 owner's 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 H2TestW by Heise? Heise? It's a German. I think it's Heise. Heise, okay, probably. That one is by far the most useful, but F3 is an open source Linux alternative and HDD low level format tool by HDGuru 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 going to 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 going to wipe it anyway. If you aren't sure how much usable space you have by the way, H2TestW is the way to go. It takes a long time to run though. So naturally we didn't run it, but Anthony actually did some poking around figuring out where it should be. So we're just going to 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, show them what you've done in Disk Manager. Sure. So actually it ended up being the beginning of the card. I thought it was the beginning. Oh, it was the beginning. Yeah, because as it turns out, the higher sector counts that were giving me the good writes, were 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 tidily into our conclusion. Would 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 on their platforms. And not every scam may even be as obvious as the one we outline 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 II 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 claim warranty service, turns out it was a counterfeit or a reject. That's why we always recommend Linus brand flash memory products. Linus 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 flash memory vendor. So 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 brought to you by FreshBooks. 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