scam or no scam?

December 11, 2007 10:57 AM

I think i got cleverly scammed on amazon? I bought a micro sd card on amazon and it has 2gb printed on it BUT when i formatted it, it told me it only had a capacity of 983mb(or something around that). Have i been scammed or is my pc crazy?

i bought this sd card:
http://www.amazon.de/SanDisk-GSM-Micro-SD-Multi-SD-Kit/dp/tech-data/B000R9YIFC/ref=de_a_smtd?ie=UTF8&qid=1197399106&sr=8-2

posted by freddymetz to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Or somebody made a mistake.

Inform the seller of the problem, assuming it's an honest mistake. If you haven't done that yet, there's no reason to panic.
posted by winston at 10:59 AM on December 11, 2007

It's big business to use eBay to scam on flash memory (USB drives, SD, etc.).
posted by kcm at 11:01 AM on December 11, 2007

Is it partitioned? I purchased an 8gb flash drive, but only 4gb was usable. Turned out that it was partitioned with only 1 4gb partition formatted.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 11:05 AM on December 11, 2007

Response by poster: its a sandisk 2gb sd card with exactly that printed on the card itself, do they make these mistakes at factories?
Is there no chance of my pc being at fault?
posted by freddymetz at 11:06 AM on December 11, 2007

How did you format it? It's possible to format any volume "down" to a smaller size by accident. The rest is unused space, similar to Cat Pie's example.
posted by rokusan at 11:10 AM on December 11, 2007

Response by poster: i just tried formatting again and now its 1.89gb so i guess its solved. Why only after the 6th format? Sorry to cause a nuiscance.
posted by freddymetz at 11:12 AM on December 11, 2007

SanDisk actually is unusual in that they have phone support. You can call them and ask. I've done this and got talked through the basic steps to determine if the problem was with their hardware or mine. Give them a call.

NORTH AMERICAN TECHNICAL SUPPORT

1(866) SAN.DISK (North America)

1-866-726-3475
7 days a week:
4:00 am. - 10:00 pm. (PST)
7:00 am - 1:00 am (EST)

SanDisk Extreme Memory cards
1-866-270-5532
posted by jessamyn at 11:13 AM on December 11, 2007

I don't have tons of experience with SD cards exactly, but I know that there are some readers that may have issues with cards bigger than X GBs, including 2.

See for example the Wikipedia article. So it is possible that your flash reader is the problem (this isn't to rule out either the card is incorrect or it just was formatted incorrectly). It might help if you posted as much as you know about it.
posted by skynxnex at 11:13 AM on December 11, 2007

Sandisk cards are widely counterfeited, and the fakes often have problems like this. Call Sandisk and ask them to verify that you have received a genuine Sandisk product. If it is, have them replace it. If it is not, send it back to the seller for a refund (and if they refuse to take it back, dispute the charge with your credit card issuer).
posted by kindall at 11:29 AM on December 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

In fact, here is a list of SanDisk "counterfeit hotline" numbers for various countries.
posted by kindall at 11:32 AM on December 11, 2007

Probably a scam. Happens all the time.
posted by Skorgu at 2:29 PM on December 11, 2007

Sorry, second item in that link is the relevant one.
posted by Skorgu at 2:32 PM on December 11, 2007

Why only after the 6th format?

Did you format on a different computer? Because skynxnex is absolutely correct. My threeish year old HP laptop won't recognize more than 1 gb on an SD card.
posted by solotoro at 2:49 PM on December 11, 2007

Whats going on is that that card is two 1 gig modules put together. If you continue to lose 1 gig or get formatting errors then its defective. I'd do more format and large copies to it and if I could replicate the problem I'd start the RMA process.
posted by damn dirty ape at 3:45 PM on December 11, 2007

Response by poster: i performed all formats on a 3 year old pc with vista installed.
posted by freddymetz at 11:25 PM on December 11, 2007