Well, because perhaps this would be a thread where we could exchange information about counterfeit/fake/relabeled products and signs to watch out for...... Fake Processors : I don't think they exist today. Any anyone verify? Fake Hard Drives : I do remember certain hard drives being "faked" by using low quality flash drive parts, the capacity might be true, but performance sucks and reliability are bottom barrel. Fake SSD Hard Drives : They generally use hard drives from low end SSD manufacturers and relabel them to high end SSD manufacturers. Typical result is performance is very poor compared to the original drives. Fake Video Cards : Relabeled video cards as per the earlier thread. Fake Flash Drives / SD Cards : They reprogram the memory to show higher capacity, this means these products will not last long and actually cannot support the capacity they are labeled to. You can use software like H2TestW to verify the capacity of these SD cards.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 Great stuff, also im not so sure about some fakes, using the real flash IC and maybe the same controllers sometimes too. its all about performance and build quality. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/05/newegg_selling_fake_intel_cpus/ probebly not what your looking for. http://hackaday.com/2014/02/19/ft232rl-real-or-fake/ I have some of those fake ones, bloody drivers. Fake arduino's.. I have some. The Atmegas got replaced but I also got some nano ones that realy have fake ATmegas on them. Not all registers work and the bootloader is permanent. weird. Just buy the originals ... ow wait, Arduino.org or .cc?
Several of the 'Fake' USB Flash drives were actually custom "loop drives" which have the drives own MCU modify the FAT filesystem to make the storage look large/infinite. These were typically used for data-logging and/or temporary/log storage on devices that did not perform log roll-over (embedded stuff). Basically the drive always has 'free' space, when in reality its only 128MB, and kept only the last ###MB of data written to any file. Not exactly what someone expects when seeing a 64GB drive for $20.... Fake DRAM, LOTS of this for older DDR / DIMM & SoDIMM modules from the usual source... made from re-badged / recycled / Falsified DRAM IC's. Terrible quality - and usually a few bad bits on each module that that they are a 'usual' brand.
I once bought a 32gb micro sd card from ebay for $5. It lasted 3 days and it's full capacity was more like 2gb. ( At first I couldn't figure out where all of my filmed video disappeared.) A week later I bought a Kingston 16gb sd card for $12. It has been working since that day without any issues.
Fake video cards: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?284237-I-got-an-unusual-GTX-560-Ti They also sand or laser alter the processor markings on cpus, i3 becomes an i7
Fake and variant Transcend compact flash cards: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/171331-fake-transcend-compact-flash-card/ Regarding video cards, the chip manufacturers make their components available to ODMs who create their own PCB designs. So some low-end or relatively unknown (read: sells in China/HK/Taiwan market) can end up putting together strange franken-products. I can't find it right now but I have (or have had) an OEM GeForce video card with ATI chips on it.
