Street corner vendors sellling Transcend/Kingston memory

T

T-Man

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Hi
Does anyone have any experience buying memory products from a streetside vendor (smous)?

I while back one of them offered me a 16 GB flash drive for R 100. This is half the price of the same item at Esquire.

Are the products the genuine article, or did they fall of a truck, or are the dealers just putting a massive markup on these items?

Strangely enough, I haven't seen any of them in the Cresta/Randburg/Rosebank area recently.
 
A simple search of the forum with give you all the information you need on this subject.
 
The old saying holds true, if it is too good to be true, it is probably not. In this regard the memory sticks firmware reports a 2gig or 4gig memory stick to be 16gigs.
 
If you want to throw your money away, give it to me, it would go to a better cause than gangs.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive#Fake_products

Fake USB flash drives are sometimes sold, claiming to have higher capacities than they actually have. These are typically low capacity USB drives which are modified so that they emulate larger capacity drives (e.g. a 2 GB drive being marketed as an 8 GB drive). When plugged into a computer, they report themselves as being the larger capacity they were sold as, but when data is written to them, either the write fails, the drive freezes up, or it overwrites existing data. Software tools exist to check and detect fake USB drives.[26][27] In some cases it is possible to repair these devices to remove the false capacity information and use them normally.
Click to expand...

I have also seen reports in the media of some Fake USB's damaging the PC, but I would not know how true that is.
 
A guy at work bought a 16GB one and it was only 2GB when he plugged it in. The thing doesn't even work anymore :(
 
hungrybeaver said:
A guy at work bought a 16GB one and it was only 2GB when he plugged it in. The thing doesn't even work anymore :(
Click to expand...


As soon as you try to copy more then the actual free space on the drive you will start to get problems, inevetably most people will format the stick at this point which will render it useless.
 
Hi Folks
Thanks for all the feedback. A few things I've learnt.

Life lessons :-
1) If it's to good to be true, it probably isn't.
2) "Always Google before asking silly questions"
3) You will alway get people making smirky comments which adds no value to the thread.
4) Majority of people provide valuable feedback of sorts.

Regarding the USB drives.
1) They are probably fake
2) They ar a lot smaller than they claim to be.
3) They probably won't work at all.

Bottom line - stay away.
 
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