Against my good judgment I headed over to eBay to get a 2gb memory stick for my PSP. I found one in California because I hate waiting for stuff to ship from Hong Kong. I waited until the last second to snipe bid, like I always do, and snagged one for $20 shipped from eBay seller lei_1002 . What a deal! Shipping was fast and I got the stick today.
However, once I popped it in and tried to transfer a 1.4gb file I knew something was wrong. Windows XP first estimated a 10 minute transfer time… then it stayed at 10 minutes for a while. Then it slowly dropped down to 9 minutes. Long story short, my file was securely transfered to the Memory Stick after about 15 minutes! At advertised write speeds of up to 80mbps, you would expect a file this size to transfer in about 5-6 minutes.
I found this program to test the speed of the stick. I also read a tip that if you look at the info screen of a fake Memory Stick in the PSP, MagicGate will show “Unknown” because the counterfeiters can’t copy Sony’s MagicGate encryption. Here are the images of my fake stick and the Unknown MagicGate from my 1gb stick that is obviously fake. I have to hand it to them, everything looks legit down to the package. Take a look at the final graph with my write speed (red)… ouch! I included a scan of my legitimate SanDisk 512mb stick for comparison. This isn’t even a high speed stick and it blows the fake one out of the water.
Wish me luck getting my money back.
