Whatever you call it; memory stick, memory card or SDcard, they refer to the same thing, external storage used for storing data. A friend of mine once gave me a micro SD card, 32GB actually, which made me very happy, only to find out it doesn’t retain data for long before it corrupts it.
That was when I realized it was a fake SD card. Today, let me show you how to identify a fake SD card when buying one. If you make use of a digital camera or other gadgets that use SD cards, you are probably aware of how difficult it can be to identify if your SD card is authentic or fake.
READ ALSO: How to recover deleted files on a flash, hard disk or memory card
SD Insight is a free, fast and easy to use android application that you can use on your device to know if your SDcard is actually authentic. Within a few seconds, the application reads the details from your SDcard and displays the information in a very easy to understand format.
How does SD Insight work?
• Download and install the SD Insight app from the Google Play store
• Insert your SD card into your Android device. (It is advisable to turn off or restart your phone to do this).
• Launch the SD Insight application you downloaded.
• Within a few seconds, your SDcard information is displayed in an easy to understand format on your device screen.
• You can see information such as manufacturer name, date of manufacture, product name, and serial number.
• If it displays invalid(Origin is Unknown), it means the SD card may be fake. Otherwise, it’s genuine.
• Click the Menu button(eye icon at the top right-hand corner) to see more detailed information about your memory card.
After running SD Insight to check my sd card, I got a message “Origin is UNKNOWN”. What does this mean?
What this simply means is that the manufacturer of your SD card is not in the SD Insight app database at the moment. This means that your SD card may be authentic, but the SD card insight cannot confirm its authenticity.
Other Alternatives to SD Insight
Fake SDcard checker allows you to the authenticity of your SDCard by doing writing test to judge whether it is fake or not. It writes data to the SD card until there is no more free space. And, read the data once written from the SD card and check that the value matches the written data. When the test is over, the capacity which could confirm the correctness is displayed.
True SD Card Capacity & Speed Test app confirms if your SD card is valid and reliable OR if it’s a counterfeit that has way less storage space than advertised. It fills your card with carefully designed files that the app can then verify to ensure that what’s written to your SDcard can be read back. It also measures read & write speed at the same time. Remember this app is still under development and it might be unstable when using it on your phone.
