If you are trying to create some additional room for disk space on your portable device, a secure digital (SD) card comes to our minds. You can either be a computer enthusiast or a geek looking to get the cheapest deal online. For some reason, SD Cards (especially micro-sd) are subject to the most significant counterfeited product available online. Arguably, most of the world’s biggest marketplaces have their fair share of counterfeited storage products. Even though almost everybody provides “Buyer Protection” or “Refund” schemes, this did not stop sellers selling counterfeit products. It could be because most users are unaware of the refund schemes or in some cases, too late to claim their refund. Whatever might be the reason, how do you know that you are a victim? How to detect fake Micro SD cards? Read more to find out!
Before going into the details, you can easily detect fake Micro SD cards by checking the following:
- Packaging built quality and initial impressions
- Lack of any proper serial number on the packaging
- 10-15% cheaper than similar configuration SD Cards from other vendors
- Low seller rating on the Online marketplaces
- Shows more capacity in the system than originally marketed
- Slow read/write performance in comparison
In our case, we bought a 64 GB micro sd card from a well-known marketplace online. The cost was too good to be true and the seller rating was close to 50%. The buyer comments were flooded with abuses. We thought this fit the description of a counterfeit product and we decided to buy it. The purchase experience was smooth and the seller shipped the product before the scheduled time. We received the product within 2 days and the product we received was exactly what we expected. We unpacked the sd card and loaded it on a Xiaomi Mi Max phone. We loaded the A1 SD Bench from the Google Play store and ran a benchmark. Even though the card was marked as a Class 10 micro sd card, the results showed otherwise. See the screenshot below:
With a read speed of 14.4 Mbps and write speed of 3.26 Mbps, the performance was worse than a class 4 sd card. In comparison, the inbuilt Samsung eMMC card on the Mi Max scored 196.66 Mbps read and 58.07 write speeds. In the next step, we installed the SD Insight app from Human logic. The results speak for themselves. See below:
The App Detect Fake Micro SD Cards with ease and the above results above lived upto its expectations. The SD Card did not had any OEM signature or any product revisions. The serial was also not valid. Even though the sd was branded as “Kingston” the app did not detect any such branding. The date of manufacture showed “May 2011” and the storage capacity as “67 GB“. You do not need to look further or leave any doubts in anyone’s mind that this one is a fake counterfeit product. The internal eMMC card in comparison showed the correct results and the benchmarks also reflected this.
Conclusion
The Online marketplace was kind enough to refund us the money, and we did not hesitate to give the seller a negative feedback. I hope this post helps a lot of potential buyers to stay alerted and buy the right product. Happy shopping!
