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[spillage]

I bought from eBay a 4Gb SONY Memory Stick Duo with an adpator for a what seemed ace, £23 shipped. It all looked good to me, and having never been done before on eBay I was none the wiser. The card formatted as normal with a near 4Gb capacity. I thought I was onto a winner.

With help from BurnDown this is what I discovered and what happens in reality for those that don't know, like me 2 hours ago.

1. The card looks brilliant. It has the right font, the right colours, the right feel etc, but no packaging.
2. I formatted it and found a near 4Gb capacity so I was happy.
3. I loaded two backups onto the card and found all was well. Games were seen and loadable.
4. I'm new to the PSP so I couldn't comment on the load time from the card, but felt they were slow.
5. All the games I tried, well the four I own and backed up played badly.
6. Driver 76 glitches every 10 seconds or so but loads and plays fine if you overlook the stutters.
7. Crush is more or less fine. The UMD is perfect but to be fair the card is not far behind.
8. WRC is again pretty much normal with the odd glitch and stutter. Much slower than UMD to load.
9. Test Drive Unlimited is the worse. It takes an age to load and stops whenever the game updates for about 20 seconds.

It turns out the card is a fake only when I try look at the information screen on the PSP. It shows Magic Gate...Unknown  

I'm going to buy an 8Gb from here now, or maybe a pair of 4Gb from here

Anyway that old saying " you get what you pay for" was driven home to me today with a large mallet. Pay attention to what you're buying and don't end up feeling a bitter plonker like me.

[sabbath_dude]

I know this thread is almost a month old but I just wanted to add a little to what spillage has said.

I too recently bought a PSP and decided I needed a larger memory card for it. Not knowing of the massive amount of fake Sony Pro Duo cards on eBay I thought I'd found a really good deal on a 4Gb stick for £25 with 24hr shipping. Anyway, after bidding I was looking around the net for info on PSP homebrew and stumbled across a thread about fake Sony memory cards and info telling you how to spot them. Here's a really useful link detailing all the differences between a genuine card and a fake CLICKY.

Eventually (after 6 days! not 24hrs like I paid for) my new memory card showed up and sure enough I'd been sold a fake   . It came in the full Sony packaging with the adapter and even had the gold hologram etc. Seems to work fine and has the full capacity you would expect from a 4Gb card (I packed it full to test for data coruption). All the homebrew and games I have backed up seem to run flawlessly and full movies/music I encoded to the highest quality play fine with no lockups or stuttering. I actually can't really fault it although I do know that data transfer speeds are slower than an original.

I'm a bit pissed at being sold a fake but at the same time I did get myself a fully working and very cheap 4Gb memory card. I emailed the seller about him selling me a fake to which he responded with an apology + offered a full refund. I've still to decide where to take it from here. Selling fake goods on eBay is fraud and the buyer is entitled to a FULL refund including all return postage costs.

So there you have it. Think twice about buying cheap memory from eBay!. Read the info in the link above before you buy (I wish I'd seen it before I did!).

QUOTE(spillage @ Jul 31 2007, 10:40 PM)

Anyway that old saying " you get what you pay for" was driven home to me today with a large mallet. Pay attention to what you're buying and don't end up feeling a bitter plonker like me.

Very true!   .

[commandersafi]

All my memory sticks say magic gate Unknown, but i know for sure that they are all real

[jon_jon]

Fake Sony MSPDs have been around for a while.  They are so rampant on ebay.  I have only purchased Sandisk and Lexar MSPDs from retail stores.

[commandersafi]

Lexar memory cards are really bad quality and dont last as long....I wouldnt recommend using them

[spillage]

Only REAL cards say SUPPORTED. If yours doesn't you HAVE a fake. There is a number in the ebay "spot a fake" stuff. I phoned Sony and they took details etc and confirmed that if is says supported it IS real. If not then it is NOT 100% compatible with the PSP.

[gorgs]

The same happend to me,the sh*ts