Flash Drive Education 102
Posted by KittyFireFlash on October 5, 2008
Where can you buy a 16Gb or 32GB true capacity USB flash Drive? Who makes them? What are the brand names and the lesser brand names? Why are they so hard to find on eBay? Are you ready to take Flash Drive Education 102? This is the second lesson in the series and we are off for another shopping trip – destination – United States.
eBay is a place where people expect to find bargains. Good value, low price. It has become a cultural thing – Globally.
In North America during the mid 1990’s Sprint introduced a commercial slogan “More…for less”. Candice Bergan, swept her arms out for “more” and brought them together to emphasize the “less”. Who ever thought that this would permeate our subconscious? The world is driven now by “More for Less”. On eBay we believe the prices are lower because the retail store and it’s overhead has been removed. For many items this is very true. But there is a lowest possible price – rock bottom. People generally do not sell things below cost. Most need to make a little profit to stay in business.
With flash usb drives there is a rock bottom price that must be paid. Anything less and a seller will be out of business. If you visit http://www.nofakeflashdrives.com/ you will learn that honest manufacturers in 2007 could not produce an 8 GB usb drive in China for less than $25 US. That included a very modest profit at the time. True, prices are dropping but not to .99 cents or 4.99 US for an 8GB drive.
Most of us thought the reason the drives were cheaper on eBay is that retail chains were putting a high markup on the drives. eBayers continue to fall by the thousands each day into the fake flash pit following that assumption. Almost all members of SOSFakeFlash are victims of fake flash drives. Yes, we thought we were cutting out the middle man too.
In Flash Drive Education 101 we mentioned that an 8 GB Kingston DataTraveller sold on sale for slightly less than $20 US. That is because this model is very slow and is being dumped to liquidate. 16GB will soon be the standard offering. We also did a litte shopping trip in China to review what manufactures offered.
Another mistake many people make is to multiply. If there is a 4GB, an 8GB, there should be 16GB, 32GB and of course 64GB! As you jump in size expect to jump in PRICE! The higher price will not be a simple 2 x 8GB = 1 16GB drive! Expect to pay upto 4x what you would pay for an 8GB drive! If you want 16GB. As for 64GB forget it, they are experimental and cost more than $1,500 US at the moment!
So where are those 16GB and 32GB drives! Are they on eBay? Yes, some are. Before trying to find them on eBay let’s visit the United States. Newegg is an internet site known to sell true flash drives. Unfortuately they do not ship internationally. Still, it is a good site to research for information on flash drives. Also customers are allowed to review the products and post their experineces. Let’s check out the drives offered in 16GB and 32GB. You will notice, there is no 64GB!
So what did you see? Newegg is considered cut rate in prices.
Did you notice something about the brand names? The drives are generally from well known manufacturers of memory chips for PC’s and Laptops. It makes a lot of sense.
What about the prices? About 40% more than you paid on Ebay? 50% more? Remember Newegg is considered bargain basement – inexpensive.
How did people rate the drives? Did you see one you liked? If so, take down the information and begin your search to hunt on eBay. Do you find the model you are interested in? If so, you need to do two things:
1) Research the sellers negatives and neutrals with this tool:
http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs
2) Contact eBayers who bought the drive from the seller
See who bought the drive and left postive feedback. Contact them. Ask if they checked the true capacity of the drive with H2testw 1.4 Find out how long they have used and how much they have stored on the drive. If you only hear wonderful things – you can consider bidding or buying the drive.
Research Before You Buy
Given the situation with fake flash drives on eBay, we recommend that you restrain yourselves from bidding. Instead, find out who bought the model, contact them to test and wait to hear from them on the results. You can refer them to this site if they seem suspicious of you or your motivations. Contact more than one person. If you get good news, you can bid on a drive.
If you do bid and you have wonderful happy news, a True Flash Seller on eBay, be sure to come back to this site and post and leave a comment.
Or write to SOSFakeFlashDrive@gmail.com
Give us the eBay item number, your id and your evaluation of both drive and seller. We would like to publish a list of good eBay sellers offering true capacity drives! You have no idea how often we are asked for the “Good” sellers! Please let us know, your fellow eBayers are desperate!
Rate Us
We don’t have a function on this site for rating. If you feel this article was helpful to you, please rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 in a comment! We need to know if articles like this one is useful or not. If so more will be coming.
1 means lousy or useless, 5 is okay and 10 means you enjoyed Flash Drive Education 102.
SOSFakeFlash 
Ed said
Play.com currently selling 16Gb flash for £16.99, this looks like a pretty good price, or is even this too good to be true?
kittyfireflash said
Play.com seems to be a lot like Newegg.com – a UK version perhaps. The interesting thing is that this site allows for buyers to rate products purchased. This is usually a positive sign. Take for example:
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3431735/Play-com-16GB-USB-Flash-Drive/ProductReviews.html
This item is branded by the site and stamped with it’s name play.com
16GB’s are dropping in price. I can see the branded ones are similar in price to newegg. The hot item is 32Gb now.
The only way to be sure is to buy one and report back after testing it. It appears good, but testing will determine if you have a site people in the UK can buy from with confidence!
Note in North America a brand name 8 GB sometimes sells for $20 us . Those are the older slower models (read and write speeds) that are being cleared out.
Note, if a drive looks anything like one of the fakes on the mugshot report…stay away from. We got a report of the cheaper ones for sale in Switzerland at an internet site being fakes while the brand names were not.
It the buying site brands with it’s name…that is a positive indication as a rule of not being a fake. It it was…they would address quickly – they want to keep their reputation.
Look for sites that allow people to comment on the product.
Look for things like…I have been using for several weeks and I can access and use all my xxGB of files…
The_Flash said
Hi there,
I know this article is a few months old, but I wanted to recommend a UK web-store – “7DayShop” – from which I’ve purchased flash memory, which has tested with positive results (it’s a good thing that h2testw runs under Linux via WINE!). They’re somewhat well-known (I had heard of them before, but only recently made my first purchase there), and are located at http://www.7dayshop.com/ .
I also wanted to confirm that Play.com is a genuine seller of genuine flash memory (I have no idea about any of the third-party “PlayTrade” sellers who can sell goods in a similar style to Amazon UK’s “Marketplace”, though, so I can’t account for them). They are a very well-known site indeed, with a good reputation to match (also, to add to that, they’re big enough that they advertise in various media in the UK, including television). That’s where I buy almost all of my flash stuff from, in fact (usually their own-brand, as it’s usually fantastic value-for-money), and I’ve never had any problems with any of it at all.
Last of all, I want to add a thankyou. I’ve never purchased fake flash myself, but without the efforts of folks like yourselves I would never have learned about it to begin with (my first experience of it was reading some articles about hacked “MP4”-players a couple of years ago – I’ll link to one of them below*, as it covers tools for checking and fixing those devices which perhaps may be of use to someone, as some of these things still appear to be available on eBay), and it would be a lot harder to educate others about it without sites such as this one to link people to. Thanks very much for providing the resources you provide – keep up the good work!
*Here it is:
The_Flash said
Oh, darn. Apparently the XHTML tag I used to put in the article’s address hasn’t shown up in my comment. *Here’s* the hacked “MP4”-player article: http://schnapp.org/e-britain_ripoff/ . Hopefully this should show up. 🙂
Sorry about that!
About Fake 64GB USB Pendrives – SONY MICRO VAULT and More « FakeFlashNews said
[…] 16GB do exist, but they will not be made in China. Not right now. See who makes them by taking the Flash Drive Education 102 . Note: As time progresses – this will eventually […]