64GB SD Card... $15??

Why pay 15 when you can get it for $12.49

LINK

If you're going to roll the dice I would do it for a 128gb card. The seller has 99.5% positive feedback with 2 people leaving negative feedback saying the card was fake.

128gb micro sd for $20

Here's the deal with these unbranded/generic chips. It's just a simple gamble, with a higher percentage chance of losing vs. going with a name brand.

The whole incestuous and gray market shite regarding flash memory is interesting to me, so here are some more details if you're curious.

There are only a handful of independent manufacturers of flash memory controllers for SD Cards, pretty much all of them in Taiwan. There might be a German one. The controller chips are responsible for data management and interfacing with the device. But the companies that fabricate NAND dies (the actual memory chip) is a much, much longer list. That means even if you buy a branded memory card, sometimes it will take some digging to know what manufacturer the controller chip came from, and even more digging to find out what manufacturer the NAND dies come from -- often from multiple sources based on the intended market and location. Some of the "big brands" that do supply their own NAND dies include Toshiba/Sandisk (actually co-own a major flash chip factory) and Samsung.

So in these unbranded ones, unless you start tracking serial numbers on the NAND die, it's a mystery where these SD cards came from. They could come from the same factories that well-known brands use, or they could come from factories in China that are known to counterfeit the big brands and use much lower quality material or at least little or no testing/binning for QC.

There's a margin of error with semiconductor fabrication that can produce a variety of less-than-spec'd batches -- inconsistent transfer speeds, lower-than-rated capacities, higher-than-intended operational voltage, or just completely non-functional. The process of testing and sorting the good from the bad (or, more appropriately, the A+ from the A from the A- to the B+, B, C, etc. etc.) has an element of overhead cost that's built into the price of "brand name" chips. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the companies that make their own NAND Dies are inherently better. In fact, Toshiba/Sandisk manufacturers for Kingston, and Kingston may accept only A+ units, while Sandisk takes the 'rejected' A- batches and sells them under the Sandisk name, so the middle-man Kingston could very well have a better quality chip, unless one of its distributors makes some slimy backdoor deals with a Chinese manufacturer that cheaply counterfeits branded cards.

Where do the rest go? Alibaba, various distributors of counterfeit products, eBay, etc., where overhead is low, because nobody's putting the leftovers under the same type screening as the big brands are doing. As a result, you get a generic half-price SD card that may work at a level acceptable (or unnoticeably deficient) to you, work OK but clearly has some issues with volatility or transfer rates or a lower-than-advertised capacity, have significant issues such as certain devices not even recognizing/interfacing with the controller, or be dead on arrival/fail without warning.

Granted, all of the above is possible with the branded ones, too, but at a smaller percentage because the units are sourced and distributed under more controlled conditions.

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If you're going to roll the dice I would do it for a 128gb card. The seller has 99.5% positive feedback with 2 people leaving negative feedback saying the card was fake.

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"Speeds were tested at 15.8MB/s read and 10.3MB/s write. That is perfect for high speed pictures and recording high definition video without stutter in recording".Yawn...