Buying Bulk New/Used Micro SD Cards

Later this year I'm likely to be looking to buy 50 or more Micro SD cards with capacity of 128MB (yes, MB not GB) or more. Looking at prices, RS and e14 sell them but don't actually have any quantity dicounts and are more expensive than Officeworks ($8), I was hoping for at least under $5.

I'm not interested in irreputable suppliers likely to be selling Chinese fakes. It doesn't matter how cheap they are if they'll probably all turn out to be duds.

Used cards may be an option, and I've watched a few sellers come and go on Ebay offering mixed lots of cards presumably pulled from old mobile phones. I'm curious whether these people work in phone stores handling trade-ins, or with one of the electronics recycling mobs. I tried to investigate the latter with the hope of being able to do some sort of back-door deal, but they don't seem to give addresses for their sorting centres (actually they seem a bit dodgy, probably unsurprising given the recent scandals in the recycling industry).

Buying off Ebay is still an option of course, I just feel like it might be better getting them from the source. I'll try in some small independent phone shops when I next have spare time in a city large enough to have them, though I'm not really sure how to find them.

So any tips for cheap Micro SD cards new/used of any capacity would be appreciated.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev
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I thought you weren't interested in "irreputable suppliers."

$13 for ten on aliexpress all look the same, so probably not recycled

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  Jasen.
Reply to
Jasen Betts

I doubt you could buy them that small. If you could they would be rare and expensive.

I have a 64 MB CF card.

Reply to
Lucifer

I think I still have a 64mb SD-card somewhere.

Reply to
Clocky

They're likely to be selling genuine used cards, and so they'll work for the rare and small write operations performed on them in my application. As opposed to fakes where many are likely never to work at any point in their life.

As stated, it's fakes that I'm wary of. There's documented evidence of this being widespread with Micro SD cards in China. Just to see, I bought a USB memory stick from Aliexpress once. After the first (attempted) write I could never read anything off it again, point proven.

If you ask for a sample then odds are that they'll send you a real card first, then when you order the 50 you'll get the fakes. I can do without all that.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

"128MB or more". SDHC, SDXC, are fine so if you know where to get

1TB cards for a couple of bucks each then I'm all ears. In terms of SD cards in current production, I'm looking for the cheapest cards in any capacity available.

I've got a 64MB Micro SD card, and they are offered by used card sellers on Ebay still. Hence why I specified greater than 128MB, which is the next common size and big enough for my application.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

A sample set of one proves nothing.

I buy USB flash drives and SD Cards regularly from Aliexpress and alwasy get what I pay for. Then again I buy from stores with good feedback and if it's mission-critical I buy from the genuine Samsung store. They aren't the cheapest but are still ~60% of the domestic price.

I've also bought (for instance) mSATA drives from companies such as 'Kingspec' from Aliexpress and they're about half the price of Samsung and have held up well for over 2 years now.

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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

US$2.64 each (inc. delivery) for 16GB Sandisk SD cards; You can buy domestic Chinese brands for a lot less than that from Aliexpress.

16GB seems to be the smallest commonly made size these days, Samsung don't make a card smaller than 32GB from what I can tell and they're about US$7 each currently. (I bought 5 of them at the end of last year for $4.99 each and some 128GB Samsung cards for >US$18 each delivered.)
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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

I'd just rather not give the Chinese another chance to try and rip me off again. Maybe as a last resort, but I can just see myself getting half of the chips DOA and having to choose between buying from a good supplier anyway, or waiting another month for SD cards from another cheap supplier to come from China.

Hard to tell how genuine a "genuine" store on Aliexpress is as well.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

I guess we all have our prejudices. I've found AE to be very reliable but ebay not so much for these sort of things.

I've bought a dozen+ SD cards from AE in the last year ranging from 32 GB to 128 GB as well as a handfull of USB flash drives of 64 and 128 GB and they've all tested as perfectly fine and are in daily use. I've also bought four or five SSDs (120 and 250 GB) and they too are great.

I've always let the feedback be my guide and it's worked well.

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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

Sounds like you have been burnt a few times as I have. I'm a bit over getting fake, misrepresented and/or defective stuff from China when it takes weeks to arrive.

Reply to
Clocky

Yeah, as much as possible I try to at least stick to things that are fairly mechanical so that you can judge from the images and the look of the items you get whether or not they'll do the job.

In this case there's also some risk that the cards might just be unreliable (poor bond wire connection or something), or not work in certain edge cases. So they might seem OK on first test but everything starts going wrong later on.

Some years ago I read an article that I can't find now where someone had decapped a variety of fake (but some very genuine looking) micro SD cards and confirmed their origins by looking at the text printed on the die and comparing to real cards from the manufacturer. As I remember it, the author had been buying cards to go into electronic devices that they were manufacturing there, and found a batch where the fakes (which they'd bought unknowingly) wouldn't work in their devices like the real ones.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

Not sure where you guys are buying your stuff, I've bought a shitload of things from Ali, Gearbest, Banggood and DFrobot and the only duds have been one SD card purporting to be a 512Gb, and one batch of 18650 batteries whos capacity was much less than advertised.

Reply to
keithr0

I also have a history of having got great deals and generally reliable stuff from China lately. There was a clue to what's being said in the last paragraph you quoted. It starts with "Some years ago..." then continues with "I read...." and "as I remember it".

I'm old enough to remember when "Made in Japan" meant unreliable s**te and people used terms like "Jap Crap".

Times change - some people's opinions just don't change with them.

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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

My 64 MB CF card is in my Nikon D70s. It gives me 18 shots at the highest jpeg setting.

Reply to
Lucifer

I finally found the article!

formatting link

It seems that the controller chip and the programmed ID information are more telling than the actual flash chip, which might be a legitimate die that was originally rejected due to defects. Or the card could be recycled, or programmed with a false capacity setting.

More SD card info here:

formatting link

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

Interesting reading but very dated now.

I have a Samsung 128 GB SD card in my Nokia 4.2 Android phone and the phone thinks it's a 256 GB card that's half full already (but can't show the contents of that half).

When I used this card previously in a Windows 10 computer it read it correctly as a 128 GB card. Without further info I'm assuming that Samsung use the same controller chip / NAND in their 128 and

256 cards (they're rated for the same speeds).

I wonder if the controller chip, being the same as for a 256 is read by the phone initially as a

256 then gives the phone a signal that only half is available. Or if there actually IS 256 GB but with faults in half of the NAND so half is marked as 'full' on the card and that's why the phone reports it as it does?
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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

Current until SD cards (and their underlying communication standards) are replaced by something newer that implements a reliable authentication system, in my opinion.

I'd guess that it's probably just a bug in the firmware, akin to how the same thing used to happen with HDDs in PCs if the BIOS's automatic CHS value detection got the wrong values and set up the HDD as if it were larger than it actually was.

SD cards are more complicated, but I've forgotten too much of how they work now to remember whether there are multiple ways of determining the total storage space. At a minimum I guess there's partition size Vs device storage size - maybe you've somehow got a partition that's twice as large as the total storage space?

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

Perhaps. I let the phone format the card as I'd been using it formatted NTFS (128 GB, as recognised by the computer) in an SD Card - USB3 adapter for a few months with Windows 10.

I forgot that when I put it in the phone and it said 'unrecognised file system' and asked to format it.

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Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

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