HOW TO KNOW ORIGINAL AND FAKE MEMORY CARD (SD)

Fake SD Card

I’m sure you must have had a bad experience buying SD cards? You are not alone. I once bought an SD card that was always prompting me to format it before I can use it again whenever I remove and insert the SD card again into my phone or whenever I restart my phone.

You can imagine what it feels like formatting you SD card every now and then, losing precious files all the time. Even though it is possible to recover a formatted storage, but doing this all the time is a pain in the ass.

I also know of a friend who bought and “8 GB” memory card only to discover that it is 2 GB, though this could have been easily prevented simply by inserting the card into a device to verify the storage capacity.

It can be very difficult differentiating between a fake memory card and an original memory card given how this cards are packaged.

They no dey write fake for package.

Even if you decide to go for a popular brands like Sony or Toshiba, you still can’t be sure because anybody can print any thing on the package. However, there are ways to know if a memory card is fake or original and we are going to discuss that in a moment.

There are two ways to do this;

• One is by using SD insight on mobile devices; android phones to be precise,
• And the other is by using H2testw on Personal Computer (PC).

How to Know Fake and Original SD Card using SD Insight. 

SD insight is a free, fast and easy-to-use mobile app that you can use to view SD card manufacturing details, original size and a lot more.
Here is how to use SD insight…
Step #1: Download and install SD insight from Google play store.
Step #2: Insert the SD card you want to test into your Android phone.
Step #3: Lunch the SD insight app and it will show you a quick info about you SD card in a very simple format.

Step #4: You can see information such as manufacturer’s name, date of manufacture, product name, serial number etc.
To get more details of you SD card, click on the eye-like button at the top of the app and it will show you more details of the card.

Step #5: If you have more than one SD card on the phone, or you want to view info about your internal storage, click on the place it says “SD Card” and select another SD card from the drop-down menu.

Step #6: You can also view validation of the  SD card against its class rating for the minimum data transfer rate (e.g. Classes 2, 4, 6 and 10).

 

Now Back to H2testw.
H2testw is another free tool that you can use to test an SD card. It can also be used to test other external storage such as USB Flash Drive and can also be use to test them for errors.

How to Test a Memory Card using H2testw

Step #1: Like I mentioned earlier, H2testw is PC app, so first you need to download it to you PC and extract the zipped file. You can download it from here.
Step #2: After downloading and extracting it, run the h2testw.exe file.
Step #3: Browse for the storage you want to test by clicking on “Select Target” and click on “Write + Verify”.