It’s amazing how much Flash-based storage technology has advanced in the last few years, especially considering how much prices have dropped.

Naturally, when it comes to speed, capacity and price, consumers tend to look for the lowest price; as manufacturers race towards the bottom line, many will take the low road and sell counterfeit goods. This is especially prevalent in the NAND Flash market, and online marketplaces like eBay, AliExpress and even Amazon are fraught with countless fake storage devices that claim high capacities at too-good-to-be-true prices. It’s not uncommon to see unrealistic capacities sold for a few tens of dollars, but what the customer ends up receiving is a storage device with a falsified capacity that will pass a simple copy-paste test but will corrupt itself with extended use.

While browsing eBay for some deals on some Flash storage, I happened upon a very strange-looking 512GB SDXC card. It was listed as an OEM Lexar card but had no labels, selling for an unprecedentedly low price of $60 USD (the card would cost several times more at normal retail outlets). On the outside, everything about the card’s exterior seems to raise a red flag that the card is not to be trusted.

eBay listing of the Lexar OEM 512GB SDXC card

Upon closer inspection, there are some hints that one shouldn’t always judge a book – er, card – by its cover. The laser-etched markings might look like cryptic gibberish to the layperson, but the markings “SM2702BAC” and “L95B” have actual meanings; the SM2702 is an SD card controller by Silicon Motion, and L95B refers to the 16nm generation of MLC NAND Flash by Micron, which owns the Lexar brand (but unfortunately is being discontinued). The seller also says that the cards have been tested, which is reassuring.

I decided to take the plunge and plunk down about $80 USD including shipping (or $105 CAD at the time) and buy a card for myself.

A Closer Look

After waiting a few weeks, the card showed up in my mailbox. The seller did a very good job packaging it, even placing the card in an ESD shielding bag before wrapping it with foam and placing it in a bubble mailer (it’s much better than the plastic wrap I’ve had some used i7 CPUs by a huge amount).

Back of the Lexar OEM 512GB SDXC card

Front of the Lexar OEM 512GB SDXC card

The card looks very plain, with the top label area lacking any labeling, and the same laser-etched markings on the back. The card’s contacts indicate that it has been placed in a card reader a few times before (presumably for testing).

Card Identification

I used my old Gateway M-7305u laptop with Kali Linux to see what information the card reports. These older laptops have true SDA (SD Association) compliant card slots, so they will identify as an actual SD card instead of a USB drive like with many modern laptops; in Linux these show up as devices like /dev/mmcblk0 instead of /dev/sda. By using the “dmesg -wH” command I can read the kernel logs once the card is connected to the computer.

[Jan24 10:52] mmc0: new high speed SDXC card at address 59b4
[ +0.094917] mmcblk0: mmc0:59b4       483 GiB 
[ +0.001111] mmcblk0: p1

The card reports a capacity of 483 GiB (that’s binary gigabytes, or 519.6 decimal – a.k.a. “weasel” – gigabytes), but the SD card name is ”     ” – five ASCII spaces. Everything about the card superficially rings alarm bells! However, I wasn’t phased, and decided to try the card in my Kingston FCR-HS4 USB 3.0 card reader, which uses the Realtek RTS5321 chipset.

OEM Lexar 512GB SDXC card in Disk Management

Examining the card in Windows shows that the card was formatted as exFAT with a drive name of “SDXC”, suggesting it may have been formatted by the seller with the SD Formatter tool. Looking at the raw sector data in Hard Disk Sentinel suggests that the seller indeed do a full capacity test, as the data patterns match that of the program H2testw, an excellent tool for detecting fake Flash memory. This is a good sign – the seller did their due diligence and by this point I already had a good feeling that the card is genuine.

However, I wanted to test this for myself, so I ran the H2testw utility myself and let it run on the card. The write speed remained consistent throughout, which is a good indication that the card is not overwriting memory locations like in fake Flash storage (the card did get uncomfortably hot during the process, however). It took four hours to complete the write and read test, but everything came out clean – the card is genuine, even when every other sign says otherwise!

H2testw verifying that the OEM Lexar card’s 512GB capacity is genuine

Performance

With the card verified, it was time to put it to the test.

CrystalDiskMark

The card showed sequential read speeds of 92.03 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 60.45 MB/s; the sequential write speed coincides with the seller’s rating of 400x (400 * 150 kB/s = 60 MB/s).

The random 4K I/O performance isn’t great, especially with writes, but it isn’t bad either. The card managed 4K random read speeds of 6.644 MB/s (1700.9 IOPS) and 4K random write speeds of 0.671 MB/s (171.8 IOPS).

Benchmark of the 512GB Lexar OEM SDXC card in CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4

Conclusion

In the end, I was satisfied – I got a 512GB SDXC memory card at a fraction of the cost from a normal retail outlet. It’s not exactly a speed demon, but it’s not a slowpoke either. The looks may be deterring for most folks (and rightly so), but with the right tools and knowledge, one can pick up one of these less aesthetically-pleasing memory cards and save some serious coin in the process.