MiSTer FPGA Forum

You know you got a counterfeit sd card as soon as you plug it in and it's a fraction of the size that you paid for. Which is why it's important to get an sd card from somewhere with a good return policy.

The one my mother got was different; it reported being a 32G card, but only actually had something like 2G. When you wrote data to it, it just kept accepting more and more, overwriting the first 2G repeatedly.

I bought several Samsung 32G cards all at once (regular SD, not micro), and all of them went flaky and weird on me after awhile. I don't know if they were counterfeit or not, but all of them failed. And they didn't die until well after an Amazon return period.

I lost a SanDisk Extreme micro-SD just recently; it worked fine in a Raspberry Pi 4B for a couple of years, with everything configured to be relatively low-write, and when I tried to re-image it to transfer it to a Raspberry Pi 400, it accepted the image, but then just... wouldn't boot the system. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't work in the 400. A different Sandisk card worked fine. Further testing with the bad card revealed it was unreliable under x86 Linux as well, so I ended up tossing it.

Even if you don't get a counterfeit, SDs are just not very reliable media. The 'high endurance' cards are better, but in my experience they're nowhere near as trustworthy as a spinning hard drive.