1tb SD cards for $10

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Bert

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I see SD cards being sold for $10 on ebay for 1TB, they look legit (not fake sized drives). Has anyone experience on those card? Can they be used for light storage purposes, for example serving media content for htpc?

How about using SD cards for long term archival?
 
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Bert

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BlueFox

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Those are fake too. It's not hard to make a sticker. Amazon is about the worst place to buy anything that is easily counterfeit.

They're not going to be close to $10 for many years. Maybe around 2030 (not exaggerating). Real ones are still well over $100 new.

As always, if it's too good to be true, it is.
 

Markess

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May 19, 2018
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I am not sure why we think it is fake. I see used 1tb named SD cards are also selling for $10. I see it is selling for $25 on Amazon.


Even if those $10 ones are fake, soon price will get there. At these prices they are getting very close to hard drive prices and way cheaper than optical media.
For Amazon, sometimes its a good idea to check out the listing particulars....ask me how I know :eek: . This listing is only two weeks old, and while its fulfilled by Amazon, the seller is "Hunanwa". As a seller, Hunanwa have 20% one star ratings. So, after a few weeks when the complaints accumulate, the listing will probably go away.

Ever since I got a shrink wrapped iPhone box with just enough Play Doh in it to make it weigh as much as an iPhone box with an actual iPhone in it, I tend to check those sorts of things almost reflexively now :p
 
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fkyuu

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Jan 24, 2023
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I am not sure why we think it is fake. I see used 1tb named SD cards are also selling for $10. I see it is selling for $25 on Amazon.


Even if those $10 ones are fake, soon price will get there. At these prices they are getting very close to hard drive prices and way cheaper than optical media.
I dont think its fake, I know its fake.
 
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oneplane

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It's fake and it's also easy to fake. Rewriting controller parameters and getting a new sticker is cheap, especially when you make a bunch of money off of it. And because there are no repercussions (especially if you are in China) you can do this with new or bought accounts until they get banned and just switch to a different scam.
 
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Bert

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For a while, I thought they are legit as the flash prices crashed across the board. After all 1tb nvmes are now around $50 new, it wouldn't be surprising to get a cheap SD card with slow controller much less than $50.

I knew about the SD card scam from a few years back. I thought by now it stopped. I have no idea how scammers make any money here. $10 for a fake card, let's say card costs nothing. They get $8.5 from ebay, package and shipping cost at least $4. So less than $5 for each sale. Let's assume labor is dirt cheap but some people will complain and get their money back, hence they will be loosing money on those transactions. I don't see how this scam works.
 
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BlueFox

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Have to make it physically smaller, which means the opposite for price.

The economics make it viable, otherwise it wouldn't be a thing. $1 at a time adds up, especially when you don't live in the US.
 
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oneplane

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They aren't really paying for shipping, that's mainly subsidised by the government (in China). As for cost per fake card: think in terms of 5 to 10 cents. They also don't really do any 'money back' type of stuff, generally if the platform requires that they just let the account get rekt en make a new one (which again, you can just buy pre-verified account bundles all day long, including packs of 100+ cracked accounts).

If you make 1000 sales, and it cost you 40 USD to do so, and you make 10 per sale, that's a nice amount to live off of, especially in certain asian countries.
 
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Bert

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If I file a complaint on a fake or damaged product on ebay or Amazon or the credit card company, I get my money back.

I assume Amazon/eBay are smart enouh not to send payments before 30 day period.
 
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Markess

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If I file a complaint on a fake or damaged product on ebay or Amazon or the credit card company, I get my money back.

I assume Amazon/eBay are smart enouh not to send payments before 30 day period.

There's multiple ways that people make the scam work. Here's a common one for example:

The typical buyer isn't a suspicious STHer. If they can insert their card in a reader or camera and have it come back as "1TB" they call it good. And, through a combination of shenanigans and an absurdly high compression ratio, the card does report as 1TB. Its slow as hell, but as you noted, you can't expect the world for only $10. They don't even question why its already formatted, because they all come formatted these days.

They don't even have any issues, other than it being slow, until after they hit the actual capacity. Again, with compression, maybe that's even a significant percentage of the supposed capacity. And the seller is hoping when that does happen, the return window is closed.

But even when people do have issues, most won't think scam, after all they verified that it was 1TB! Some won't bother trying for a refund (its only $10!). Or they will try reformatting and assume that when it formats to 16GB, it has gone bad, because they'd verified it was 1TB when they got it!

Some might even get a refund. But most won't for one reason or another: return window closed, don't want to go to the bother, bought a bunch "just to have them" and didn't break into any for months, etc.

And even if the heat is on, the seller can just claim they got a bad batch and they promise they will stop selling them. Nobody at Amazon is going to do a forensic investigation for $10.
 
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