Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on ebay

[MastaMax]

For everyone considering buying a SD or micro SD card on ebay, don't. 99% are fakes, I didn't find a genuine one so far.

What happens is they sell fake cards, which will show you the right amount of space in windows or on your device, but the micro controllers on the cards are actually reprogrammed.

They will show 32GB for example, but the card contains only 2GB of space. What will happen, you won't see anything until you try to read a file; the index pointing to the file will just overwrite the other files. It's a bit complicated to explain with words, but in simple:

Run this tool: http://mympx.org/Downloads/p13_sectioni ... _fileid/13
It will fill you SD with data, then try to read that data and show you if your card is corrupt or not.

Worst part is Ebay protects those sellers. Just opened a claim in paypal, and it ended up with me getting my money back at the condition of sending the item back to the seller (so he can sell it back to someone else!).

This is the results with my 32GB card:

The media is likely to be defective.
1.8 GByte OK (92672 sectors)
29.1 GByte DATA LOST (65412608 sectors)
Details:29.1 GByte overwritten (65412608 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
0 KByte corrupted (0 sectors)
128 KByte aliased memory (256 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000002d20000
Expected: 0x0000000002d20000
Found: 0x00000007cf0e0000
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 6.52 MByte/s
Reading speed: 11.91 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

 

[KTMphil]

Re: Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on e

What a pain in the ass - you can't even buy Sd cards on the internet any more.

 

[MastaMax]

Re: Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on e

Yep, bought 3 from different sellers, all 3 were fakes. Ended up buying one at central, but they didn't have 32GB, had to go with 16.

 

[alexuk]

Re: Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on e

So what was the orange light on the cam for?

 

[MastaMax]

Re: Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on e

Don't know, but I got all the footage from both days. The orange light should mean that the card is 80% full, which was not the case. Have to sort that out, will try to film the card full and look if I get the full 16GB of video.
For the weekend footage, will need to do some editing to get a nice video. Noticed shooting backwards from your goggle strap looks pretty nice, should have done more of that.

 

[Tom]

Re: Helmet cams and GPS owners: beware of SD cards sold on e

I doubt you would save much by buying them on ebay anyway, even if they weren't fakes. I bought a 32 Gb Kingston Class 4 MicroSD for my ContourGPS last month at a computer-shop at the local Big C, and it only cost me 1300-something baht.