HEADS-UP: Counterfeit Kingston Data Traveller

[kooliepup]

The last 2 Data Travellers I have bought off Ebay have been copies.
They work OK, but write speeds are very slow.
Bought from different sellers, they both have a little silver oval sticker on them, which is not shown in the pic that the sellers display.
The stickers have 2 letters on them, probably denoting the manufacturer.
One I have has KF on it. The other one had different letters, and I already scraped it off.

I have now changed to SanDisk Ultra, and they are genuine, and noticeably better than the Kingston, which I was always happy with before.

[nubc]

I bought a box full of Kingston Data Traveler thumb drives a few years ago, all counterfeit junk, as I learned from Kingston when I submitted serial numbers. The packaging was very impressive (authentic looking). I just wonder why the counterfeiters didn't make the drives functional, if they are gonna go to all that trouble.

[Adagio]

I have a couple of Kingston branded MicroSD cards which are slow.
They have the silver oval sticker with WY 2012 on them.

I have changed brands now too, now using Transcend.
A pity that Kingston has to suffer for these cheapskates.

[Bert]

Thanks for warning us, Kooliepup.

I had come across very cheap Kingston sticks in ads, wondering what to think

Just saw a nice offer on a local selling site: Kingston DataTraveller 512GB for 75 euro.

The packaging in this case gives enough warning I think...

[greengeek]

I had some counterfeit usb sticks and found that they worked well until they contained a certain amount of data and then started overwriting previously loaded data - this was because the ram chip was 2GB but the internal controller had been hacked to advertise itself as an 8GB drive. After loading more than 2GB of data it was just re-using the space. Took me weeks to discover the data corruption.

There was a Windows program I found that did a write/readback comparison test to evaluate actual size and write speed. Can't quite recall it now - Hwrite or something. I will try to find it.

EDIT :Found it - it's called H2Testw

here:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/ ... it-drives/

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/H ... 49366.html

Must be something similar for Linux...

[Pelo]

there is a pet for Puppy Linux for measuring reading and writing speed. I come back and provide it