In ,
Lostgallifreyan wrote:
"BillW50" wrote in :

I have heard lots of stories about SD and flash drives failing. I
never had one fail yet and some are really old (12+ years I would
think). One guy I know has failures as short as two weeks. Although
he constantly writes to them and uses the dirt cheap ones. All of
mine I don't think I have more than a thousand writes on any of them.

It's possibly my Kingstons were fakes. Not all that likely, but
bought from a small local shop. If they had been, the shop wouldn't
have known either. I've seen a couple of real fakes since though,
they're usually more obvious, rough-looking in some details, or with
half claimed capacity, slow access, or worse.

I find that cheap SD cards are a bad bet, but cheap CF cards often
score high. Best for top nothc in both is Transcend, at least, last
time I bought. Sandisk on eBay is impossible, fakes that make a
minefield more mine than field. Hopefully Transcend won't suffer the
same fate. Maybe not though, I think they were more open about their
detailed documentation, so fakers can't so easily rely on buyer's
ignorance of details. (I wish ALL parts were so openly spec'd as
those things were!) Anyway, Transcend were the only CF cards I ever
found that reliably gave me performance like UDMA mode 5. And at a
modest price that made Sandisk look very disappointing, even greedy.

All wonderful information! Many thanks! I bought a fake off of eBay
once. An 8GB SD card which turned out to be really a 2GB SD card. I
tried looking for ways to fix it so everything would see it as a real
2GB once again.

I never found a good way to do this. So I cheated and used a
partitioning utility and created a partition of 2GB. Now an OS won't
touch the unreal 6GB part.

This fake 8GB is really slow at writing. Of course I don't trust it with
original files or anything. But it has been doing very well otherwise.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - OE-QuoteFix v1.19.2
Centrino Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz - 2GB - Windows XP SP3