Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)

Subject: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 Jun 25 - 03:57 PM

I came across a couple of Reddit discussions today that bear sharing here.

One discussed the lack of care when buying items from Amazon "stores" (in this case Nikon cameras) and that the "stores" are not in fact businesses selling their own materials via Amazon. In some cases the items on the shelf are from several vendors and when an order is filled, whatever item is grabbed may or may not come from the vendor you chose. And because they don't do great quality control on returned items, you can get used or defective items. I guess so far I've been lucky, but I'm also careful. After looking through Amazon and finding odd offers and groupings of bundled items on the camera I was shopping I backed out and bought it from a New York City camera store (same price, but a much more reliable vendor).

The other thing is not a surprise, and I haven't had problems with SD cards I've purchased, but fake SD cards are what you get when lower quality or capacity cards are re-marked to look like the faster more expensive ones. (This is beyond the "you get what you pay for question" - if the price is too good to be true, you should already know that it probably is fake.) It's enough of a problem that there is software to test the speed and capacity of the cards you have. https://h2testw.org/. Has anyone tried this? From the site:

The program is incredibly easy to use, and it can be downloaded and installed on your computer free of charge. Once you have installed H2testw, all you have to do is plug in your storage device and select it from the program’s interface. Then, you can start the testing process, which will scan your device for its actual size and check for any bad sectors.

One of the best things about H2testw is that it can test a wide range of storage devices, including USB sticks, SD cards, and hard drives. This means that no matter what type of device you are using to store your data, you can use H2testw to ensure that it is functioning properly and has the amount of storage space that it claims to have.

Another great feature of H2testw is that it can provide you with detailed information about your storage device, including its read and write speeds. This information can be incredibly useful if you are looking to optimize your device’s performance or if you want to compare the performance of different storage devices.

H2testw is also a great tool for anyone who is concerned about the security of their data. By checking for bad sectors on your device, H2testw can help you identify any areas of your storage device that may be prone to data loss or corruption. This can be especially important if you are using your storage device to store sensitive information, such as financial data or personal documents.

Instructions for how it works

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 07 Jun 25 - 12:23 AM

How to Avoid Counterfeit Products on Amazon
Yes, even products with that Prime checkmark could be a dupe.

Not sure if this is helpful or not. It seems to be actually more for sellers and their items being copied or hitched onto on Amazon, but it might help (looking to see who all sells the items, for example.)

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Jack Campin
Date: 07 Jun 25 - 04:00 AM

If there was a way of hacking that product it could be a horrific malware vector loading bad stuff onto your SD cards.

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 07 Jun 25 - 01:48 PM

That would be much worse. Good reason for formatting once installed. Having the wrong capacity and speed would slow or disable devices; it's the equivalent of $1 bills being bleached so they can run through printers to make them $10s or $20s. The base material is what is needed to pull off the scam.

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: DaveRo
Date: 01 Jul 25 - 11:51 PM

Sandisk and Kingston cards averaged 4,634 and 3,555 read/write cycles before first error... Some off-brand cards failed after only 27 cycles

Tech Hobbyist Destroys 51 MicroSD Cards To Build Ultimate Performance Database

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 15 Aug 25 - 04:20 PM

It's getting close to when I will have to upgrade the Dell desktop to Win11. It's doing fine, purchased in 2019, but I didn't put in a lot of RAM at the time. I find now that the DDR4 is becoming scarce and more expensive. My computer configuration has 8GB sticks on DIMM1 and DIMM2. The configuration is such I could add two more 8GB sticks to DIMM3 and DIMM4, or I have to go up to 16 and put it on all four. I've opted to put in 16GB on all four, but Dell is out of stock.

Amazon has a gazillion, but after reading about the fakes and seeing that there is a scarcity problem (that will inspire more fakes) I can't believe it, but I bought the kits from Best Buy. I detest them for most things, but I'm hoping they have good control of their inventory. It is nominal - $10 more a kit, but worth the reliability. (I picked up Crucial kits - none of the review sites were sharing comparisons of the different companies, they just want to compare DDR4 and DDR5, so I ended up over on Reddit. Which usually comes through on this kind of thing.)

On this I should have acted sooner. Prices have gone up about 25%, thank you for nothing, Donald Trump.

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 18 Aug 25 - 11:59 PM

Part of the "fake" I was disappointed to find this evening is that when six years ago I ordered this computer with 16GB RAM, Dell shorted me. There was only one 8GB stick in there. I even looked at the original order to be sure what was in it because I figured if I had two 8's the cheapest upgrade was to add two more 8GB cards. Just as well I ordered four 16GB for all for DIMM slots or I'd be putting it back together tonight only to open it up again when the rest of what I needed arrived. (There are configurations for how much memory goes where in each slot and what needs to be paired or not.)

Back then I was figuring I'd add RAM later because memory was cheap. I should have done it a while ago while DDR4 was still cheap. But these look like they'll do the trick.

Subject: RE: Tech: Buying electronic items (avoid/detect fakes)
From: Reinhard
Date: 19 Aug 25 - 05:03 AM

We still have about 30 Dell desktops Optiplex 7070 from 2019 in our department. All but one have one 16GB DDR-2666 DIMM and run just fine with both Windows 11 and Linux. (We have applied for replacements and they will have 32GB which is now our purchasing department's recommendation.)

Adding another 16GB Kingston DDR4-2666 DIMM from a reliable seller costs about €62 in Germany.

16GB DDR4-3200 DIMMs would cost just €45.50 but one shouldn't mix DIMMs of different speeds so one would have to replace the existing DIMM and buy two or four new ones.