Memory sticks from eBay: The truth!

Considering buying a new Memory Stick Pro Duo? Be sure to read this first. You may have read about the Real vs Fake: Inside the memory sticks article, which tells you the differences between the real and fake Sony memory sticks. Now that you know how to spot a real memory stick from a fake one, lets see how the fake stick bought from eBay levels up to the real thing in practice.

Before we start, I’d like to give a little bit of background. Before I made the purchase, I did what every eBayer should do before buying an item such as this – I spoke directly to the seller. I popped the question straight away, and asked the seller ‘Are your memory sticks genuine Sony?’ To my amazement, he came right out and said, no, they are fakes. Obviously, the seller doesn’t say in his auction that they are fake, but he did admit that he does tell anyone that asks that his are fake. He also told me any seller claiming to be selling genuine memory sticks on eBay are probably lying.

Click “Full article” to see the full review, and to find out what a seller of “fake memory sticks” has to say, and which memory stick comes out on top – real or fake!

Considering buying a new Memory Stick Pro Duo? Be sure to read this first. You may have read about the Real vs Fake: Inside the memory sticks article, which tells you the differences between the real and fake Sony memory sticks. Now that you know how to spot a real memory stick from a fake one, lets see how the fake stick bought from eBay levels up to the real thing in practice.

Before we start, I’d like to give a little bit of background. Before I made the purchase, I did what every eBayer should do before buying an item such as this – I spoke directly to the seller. I popped the question straight away, and asked the seller ‘Are your memory sticks genuine Sony?’ To my amazement, he came right out and said, no, they are fakes. Obviously, the seller doesn’t say in his auction that they are fake, but he did admit that he does tell anyone that asks that his are fake. He also told me any seller claiming to be selling genuine memory sticks on eBay are probably lying.

This gave me a small insight into the minds of the fake memory stick sellers. Maybe they’re not the scamming devils that I first thought they were. After further questioning, the seller gave me even more information, telling me that most of the chips from his memory sticks are made by Toshiba, although because they are fake some will have been made by other manufacturers. I questioned the reliability of these memory sticks, to which the seller simply responded check my feedback.

Although I will not reveal any numbers in order to protect the sellers identity, he is a very big seller of memory sticks on eBay UK, and has an amazing level of feedback. The seller also told me that these sticks do not store less than the official Sony cards, and that the fake cards actually have a slightly higher transfer speed. Of course, I won’t be taking the sellers word for it, I’ll be testing both these factors out later.

I received my ‘new’ 1gb Memory Stick Pro Duo through the post just 3 days after I bought it from ebay. My first impressions were: pretty good. The memory stick came Blister packed, and came with what must have been a ripoff of officially Sony documentation. How do I know this? The cover that comes in the Blister pack was clearly marked as Sony, with the 1GB memory stick Pro Duo, and all the 1GB markings on the front. If I turn the cover over, it has the specifications for a 2GB memory stick on it. Nothing you wouldn’t expect when buying a fake stick.

The Memory stick itself isn’t that bad of a copy. To the untrained eye it looks pretty legitimate, however if you look closely at the joints you can see where it has been glued together, but no glue was coming out of the joints – which is a good sign. Now for the practical test – in the PSP!

Firstly, despite the rumours, the memory stick was recognised by my PC straight away without formatting. Of course, the memory stick was completely empty, but it was recognised by my PC and I could write to it. I then formatted the memory stick from my PSP, everything was going smoothly. Now, lets test the speed of it compared to my trusty old 32mb Sony stick. For the test data, I have selected some .Mov videos, which totaled 26.1Mb in file size.

First up: The ‘fake’ 1GB stick
Time: 51.70 seconds.

Secondly: The 32mb genuine Sony stick
Time: 42.22 seconds

As you can see, the 1GB stick got thrashed by the tiny 32mb genuine Sony stick, with a difference of almost 10 seconds. This difference could just be down to the size of the memory sticks. As I did not use a 1GB genuine stick to compare to, these results are not what you’d call ‘scientific’.

Now the second test: storage. My fake 1GB stick has a user capacity of 969Mb according to both Windows and the PSP. A genuine Sony 1GB memory stick pro duo according to Amazon, holds just 940MB.

This brings us to a tie. The genuine Sony stick stands up to the fake on transfer speed, but the fake provides an extra 19MB of storage space. My advice to you? Go with whatever your comfortable with. Another advantage of fake memory sticks, and for most people the weighing factor, is the price. You have the choice, get a cheaper stick with more storage space, or get a more expensive stick with the Sony guarantee and slightly faster transfer speed.

Whatever you choose to do, don’t rule out either possibility. The people that sell the fake sticks aren’t monsters, and the ones that i have dealt with don’t lie about the legitimacy of their sticks. If your unsure about a stick on eBay, don’t be afraid to ask the seller – it may prove useful in the future. Just because it’s fake, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Do be vigilant though. as with most things that are cheap, you can’t always be sure what your getting. I may have been lucky with mine, and other fake sticks may have a slower transfer rate, less storage, and be bad quality. If you have any doubts, I’d still advise you to buy genuine Sony or Sandisk.

I will tell you if my newly-bought 1GB stick breaks at any time in the near future, and I apologise for the bad quality of my digital camera!