Peter Lowham
Fake/ cheap SD, microSD cards and USB sticks: Advice and Warning
The purpose of this post is to provide some advice and cautionary notes on the burgeoning supplies of cheap SD, microSD and USB memory devices that are flooding onto the market currently especially through eBay and Amazon.
These are usually larger capacity units (but not limited to), say 256, 512, 1000 GB and larger units and are advertised at unrealistically low prices when compared to a comparable device from a reputable seller.
As an example, in my case, I wanted a 256GB USB stick for one particular job, so I looked on eBay and found this size of device for £8.99. The normal price of this device would be around £50 - £60 but, as I only wanted the stick for a one-off job, I thought that the cheap device would do.
Well folks, I could not have been more wrong! When the cheap USB stick arrived, I did a quick copy test of some music files and it seemed to be good.
However, when I started up the copy of 220GB of music files, the copy process estimated about 8 hours. 16 hours later, it was still copying. I began to look at the folders and files that were already copied and began to find various errors.
1. Some artist and album folders existed, but had only partial tracks copied.
2. When I tried to open some other folders, I got a ‘File is corrupt’ messsage.
3. Some artist and album folders were missing altogether.
I was going to send the USB stick back, but I thought that I would do a bit more investigating. I came across a great software program on the web called ‘h2testw’ (free to all users). Installing and running this gave some very interesting results. Along with some further research on the web, I found the following.
‘h2testw’ analyzed my stick and informed me that only about 15GB of the total memory stick was functional, the remaining 240GB was completely faulty in some way or not there at all.
The internet research suggests that there are large factory units in China which get 16GB memory units and ‘hack’ the devices’ internal ‘memory allocation table’ so that the devices report that the units have much more memory than they really do have. It seems that this is being done on a very large scale, hence the flood of these counterfeit devices onto the internet.
Therefore, when you are copying files to this device, much of your data is disappearing down a ‘black hole’. No errors are reported back to the copy process so you won’t know about the missing data until you look for it.
A number of Brennan users were posting problems with their Brennans especially when ‘Export’ing their collection for backup. At least one of the users confirmed that his memory device was a fake, with the likelihood that the others were also fake.
The micoSD and SD cards in the Brennans are the heart of the units, and their reliability depends totally on these being genuine, good quality cards or sticks.
So, if you have purchased cheap memory cards and are using them in your Brennan, I would urge you to download ‘h2testw’ and test your memory devices.
Unfortunately, the program only works on Windows at this time.
I have attached the test logs from the fake USB stick and a good USB stick, as well as another screen comparison of a test copy of some music folders which shows the discrepancy between the source folder and the fake stick folders. This was only a 14GB copy set, but 4GB of data comprising of 18 folders and nearly 400 files are missing, with no errors reported.
My advice here is to check the memory device price with a reputable seller such as Argos and use the price given as the realistic target. If you see the same device advertised on the web at well below this price, then it is almost certainly a fake.
My apologies for such a long winded post, but your Brennan and your music collection are valuable! If you are backing your collection up to a potentially fake unit, it could be a very painful situation if you needed to restore music folders and files back to the Brennan.
Regards,
Peter.
