HDD GURU FORUMS

I have just had in a MicroSD (Pic attached). The card was purchased of eBay, so might be a counterfeit. There are about 900 images on it, but a big chunk of the images have no data (about 300). I can see the image names, size, date etc, but they all show up as 00 in Hex. Done a scan with R-Studio and they don't show as deleted files so I presume its a Controller chip malfunction. I also presume the data is gone? Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi,
I would say definitely counterfeit.

I bought a lot devices recently. SD Cards, Flash Drives, MicroSD a little while ago, choosing ebay deals that look really good.

None of the 64GB ones could hold 64GB. Write speeds were incredibly slow, over an hour to write 100Mb is some cases.

Some had controllers that were definitely labelled as something they were not.

They write ok for a little, until the flash chip is "full" then either write filenames to the FAT but cannot write DATA, or crash, or windows pops errors, or the data loops back to the "start" of the chip overwriting previous data .

Most of these I confirmed flash chip could not hold advertised data.

Sorry but in your case it is likely the actual photo data was never written in the first place.

Must be quite tricky to write the firmware for these devices, I would love to see some.

Thanks HaQue, confirms my suspicions.

Just a note

eBay have a very good anti counterfeit policy for electronic devices

If you open a dispute and make it very clear that it is counterfeit. They will refund you within a day or two..

http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/
http://www.ebay.com.au/gds/All-About-Fake-Flash-Drives-2013-/10000000177553258/g.html

I read one fascinating writeup on how the fake flash market works on eBay. IIRC it was a link out of the first site I posted. The way the criminals would setup accounts years ahead, sell some goods to get a rating up and then leave it dormant until needed. Needed because another fake flash account got burnt.
I think the sheer volume of info at the first link, and the way it is set out does it a dis-service, as it is hard to read more than 10 mins, unless you are truly intrigued.

The scale of the Flash Fraud is unbeleivable