Fake Memory Chips Failing

There is an 'outbreak' of fake memory chips. These are mainly sold on eBay and are listed as 1gb, 2gb, 4gb, 8gb, 16gb and 32gb. Even though the problem is over 10 years old, thousands of these devices are being sold on a daily basis.

Most of them have only a fraction of the stated memory, we have seen them with as little as 64mb on a '1GB' chip, and more recently a 1GB chip on a '4GB' SD card. In the latter case, our customer had photographs from a recent holiday to Egypt, fortunately we were able to recover over 90 percent of the photos.

Many of the fake chips will work perfectly until the required memory usage becomes greater than it's physical size. What happens is that the processor attempts to write to the non-existent memory address and can render the chip dead - it will not be recognised any longer in the camera or computer. When this happens, the only method of recovery is to remove the chip and recover the data manually.

What we believe happens, but we are not 100 percent certain until we have tested more fake chips to destruction, is that the processor detects 'faulty' blocks and attempts to replace them with spare blocks. Once the spare block banks become depleted the memory card no longer functions.

Using our advanced memory recovery techniques we are able to recover most of the existing data on these fake memory devices.

According to other reports, over 95 percent of memory chips sold on eBay are FAKE. So either buy from a reputable seller, or buy them from a well known retailer.

Links to reports:

• EBay Report

User reports:

• projectglop
• overclockers