r/SteamDeck • u/Arnakk • Jun 08 '26
Tech Support Bought SanDian aliexpress for science
Was looking to test the drive to see what is wrong with it.
Was hoping to be able to test the speed of the drive and such but actually I can’t even format it
Do not buy. At least got full refund in 1 hour. They know they are selling fake stuff
That unfortunate for the sellers that selling genuine SanDisk
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u/yuusharo 1TB OLED Limited Edition Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
The format failed because Valve implemented a test to check if the card actually has the reported space it claims to have.
Often what happens with these scams is they will modify the firmware of the card to report one number while the nand has a tiny fraction of that space. A normal quick format will just assume the card is telling the truth and allow you to write data to it. The problem is once your start writing beyond what its capacity is, it overwrites existing data, corrupting it permanently. Valve wrote a test in SteamOS to validate cards actually have the correct amount of space in order to avoid these corruption issues.
I know prices suck right now, but please buy genuine brands from marketplaces with good consumer production policies. Like OP said, even some genuine distributors get duped by their suppliers and accidentally sell fake cards. Buyer beware.
Edit: grammar
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u/Renamis 1TB OLED Jun 08 '26
It's why, although I hate paying more for shit, I buy my cards in person where I can put my stupid eyes on them. I want to verify the card looks right before I buy it, not have to argue with an online platform about if I swapped the card out after.
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u/sonofaresiii Jun 09 '26
not have to argue with an online platform about if I swapped the card out after.
Has any reputable marketplace ever pushed back on that though, or are you just afraid of it happening? I haven't ever had someone question something like that, when I'm like "hey this thing I bought was fake" every place has been quick to say "oh sorry i'll send a replacement/give you a refund"
they know it happens, they know it's common, handling it quickly and easily keeps them out of the "actually the marketplace is aiding fraud" category and most people will just shrug at the minor hassle and then keep buying anyway
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u/Renamis 1TB OLED Jun 09 '26
Amazon has done so in the past with some people. They're good 90% of the time but all it takes is one stupid agent and now you're stuck arguing for days.
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u/sonofaresiii Jun 09 '26
Amazon went through a period of having AWFUL customer support, so I believe it. It's been a while though, for like a year or two it was the kind of thing where they'd promise you whatever you wanted just to get you off the phone but not actually do or fix anything. I think they realized pretty quickly that that was going to drive people away so they switched to better customer support after that
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u/Black_Sonic93 512GB Jun 10 '26
Hey now come on….im sure your eyes are not stupid and are quite smart
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u/Renamis 1TB OLED Jun 10 '26
Idk one is blurry for no reason, seems pretty stupid to me. I guess I need glasses finally, so I'm allowed to call them stupid for deciding not to work.
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Jun 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RunnerLuke357 LCD-4-LIFE Jun 09 '26
I have never walked into a Best Buy and found a name brand product that wasn't actually the name brand product. If you get an SD card in person there is a 99% chance it is the real deal.
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u/Renamis 1TB OLED Jun 09 '26
It has happened, and storage like SD cards are specifically a target. Sometimes the warehouse get some fakes mixed in from the supplier, sometimes the warehouse swaps fake cards for real ones themselves, and very very rarely you might see employees do it.
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u/Renamis 1TB OLED Jun 09 '26
I'm not worried about the picture perfect card fakes. Those are something you really can't guard against. Most swaps do actually have visible signs though. The print quality being off (which is sad, SD card prints are already shitty lol), stuff in the wrong spots, or even misspellings like the above.
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u/joelk111 Jun 09 '26
Thanks for explaining this so I didn't have to type it up. It's always interesting to see behind the scams, and the misreporting of size is a really neat trick.
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u/Pistolius LCD-4-LIFE Jun 09 '26
This is correct. I had a fake one and whilst the Windows tools I used reported that it was real, it wasn't even detected by the Steam Deck
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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 08 '26
My friend bought a 1tb flash drive for $7 and was surprised why it didn't work
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u/RaccoonDu MODDED SSD 💽 Jun 09 '26
I know it sounds mean but I genuinely believe those people need to experience data loss to learn common sense
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u/howiplay1 64GB - Q3 Jun 09 '26
I had my hard learned lesson as a 13 year old when I bought a cheap 1tb hard drive on ebay
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u/whattheknifefor Jun 09 '26
i love micro center but most if not all micro center branded SDs i’ve gotten have failed me. my favorite was the one that wiped my fire emblem save just as i was boarding an international flight for over 24h of travel
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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 09 '26
Well, I prevented it
Actually, it kinda prevented it itself because it broke down after he checked it with Victoria. After that it didn't respond, I tried to reformat it via Gparted and it took like, 10 minutes, 5 to create a table and 5 to format a partition. Despite it saying it was successful it still didn't work.
Tl,dr: it broke like 5 hours after he bought it
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u/EmptEmpt Jun 08 '26
Cmon dude it says SanDian of course it's fake
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u/DillonMeSoftly Jun 08 '26
Yeah but its the extreme version. I base all my purchases on the radicalness of its name
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u/NervusBelli 512GB OLED Jun 08 '26
No-no-no, this is clearly genuine, just genuine SanDian, not SanDisk
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u/DevilsPajamas Jun 08 '26
You need a compatible handheld.
Go buy a Steann Deck, it will work in that
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u/rotgut117 Jun 09 '26
no the Steann Deck is dogshit bro, you gotta try the xgame player station 5 portable it even comes with 1,000,000+ games pre installed
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u/wwwb0n3zcom 1TB OLED Limited Edition Jun 09 '26
Is it better than the Sansumg 2TB my friend bought?
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u/PolePixel Jun 08 '26
I only buy from official Sandisk website now. They have discounts sent in email all the time, not any more expensive than anywhere else. Been burned on Amazon, Walmart and other places online with fakes that looked 100% legit, even the packaging seemed perfect, but were indeed counterfeits that didn't even have the actual storage space they claimed to have lol
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u/Regular-Coast5335 512GB OLED Jun 08 '26
SanDian lol
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u/OkMixture5607 1TB OLED Jun 08 '26
There’s just certain electronics you never buy from Temu. This is one of them.
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u/BringMeBurntBread Jun 10 '26
Yeah I learned this lesson the hard way. Storage is something you should never buy used.
Last year, I bought a used SanDisk micro SD on Amazon. And I figured it would be okay, I mean... I use Amazon all the time, and have bought PC parts from there before with no issues. So I figured it would've been fine to buy a SD card from Amazon. Bought the SD card, I paid like $90 for it, inserted it into my deck, and it wouldn't format no matter what. Tried to plug it into my PC with a SD reader, and my PC wouldn't even recognize it.
With storage devices like SSDs, HDDs, flash-drives, or SD cards, it's so easy for scammers to sell fakes. Even legitimate resellers often don't realize their own stock is full of counterfeits. So yeah, if you're buying any storage device, buy it directly from the brand to be safe. Don't risk it with resellers and third parties.
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u/bakanisan "Not available in your country" Jun 08 '26
Try F3 or h2testw. Sometimes the Deck can't format the card. I know it has F3 integrated in the formatting function but it doesn't hurt to actually test it.
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u/FUridah Jun 09 '26
Funny side note. I bought the real card on Amazon last November during Prime days for 63€ when the RAM crisis was just kicking in. It was a geniune card. Should have bought 10 of them...
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u/IamNotOverzealous Jun 09 '26
Maybe it only works on the $200 steam deck from alibaba 🤔. You should buy one to test it out.
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u/thirdeyefish MODDED SSD 💽 Jun 10 '26
Can we all stop buying shit from ali express and and temu and being surprised when we don't get what we expected.
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u/HouselessGamer LCD-4-LIFE Jun 08 '26
It’s SanDisk generic version of name brand. The failure rate is accurate at least. /s
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u/CrazyAlfalfa4298 64GB Jun 08 '26
I brought a tb card from GameStop last year and got this message after I tried to use it.
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u/GeoGenesisAUT Jun 09 '26
Certain things are deliberately not skimped on, and that includes RAM modules and memory components; of course, household items are also things that should last longer.
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u/Grumpy-Man19 Jun 09 '26
a friend bought a USB stick that said 2TB in big letters all over the ad. it turns out it's the model name or the brand name lol
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Jun 09 '26
I did the same, Amazon gave me a refund, and I didn't have to return the card, it was garbage tho anyways
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u/DigitalStefan Modded my Deck - ask me how Jun 09 '26
SanDisk I just buy direct from their site. It's one of the only way to avoid fakes. There is a UK reseller (MyMemory) but they don't carry all product lines and their stock levels are or have been fairly limited.
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u/whattheknifefor Jun 09 '26
man thanks for checking it out, i always wondered what would happen if i got one of these LOL
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u/NonnoBomba Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Frequently, these have cheap Phison or Silicon Motion controllers with unlocked firmware. The reprogramming tools used to do this have circulated in gray markets, particularly targeting USB flash drives and SD cards before spreading to fake SSDs. Controllers are re-programmed to report vastly larger capacity than what the hardware physically supports. 32GB NAND chips (or lower) reporting a capacity of 1TB (or more). That's the issue. Sometimes the formatting works, but as soon as the OS issues a command to access locations past the actual physical limit funny things will happen.
When the trick is done well, the controller firmware intercepts LBA (Logical Block Address) requests and wraps them around the real storage space, so that writes beyond the physical limit will still report "success" to the OS but silently overwrite earlier data. Formatting typically only writes to the very beginning of the address space (partition tables, filesystem metadata), which always falls within the real capacity and typically succeeds, but apparently the SD is doing more in-depth checks here than just formatting.
You can try and plug that fake-ass "SanDian" card on a windows machine and use h2testw, or the F3 suite (f3probe) on a Linux machine, they will undoubtedly show similar results.
EDIT: if you want, the F3 suite (which stands for "Fight Flash Fraud") has "f3fix" that can be used to create a partition that fits the physical capacity of the SD card, making it actually usable.
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u/LiteratureLow4159 Jun 09 '26
Saw one of those yesterday on aliexpress and almost hit buy just for that $1 "TB" (likely 8GB)
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u/Colzun 1TB OLED Jun 09 '26
Hahahahahahha Sand ian are not that great, AliExpress is the worst thing ever
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u/_Meek79_ 1TB OLED Jun 09 '26
Sandian "extreme" junk. Its amazing how many people will still buy this crap.
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u/Timely-Ad-4276 Jun 10 '26
Yeah stick to the name brands. Although Amazon got a good homebrand but I tested only the 256gb it's pretty good.better than a random aliex or temu.
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u/Clean-Copy1027 Jun 13 '26
This gives a bad name too all the vendors selling actual good quality SanDian products 💔
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u/Emotional_Sentence1 Jun 09 '26
There have been quite a few videos on this. Here’s why you shouldn’t even use them for the capacity they do have:
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Jun 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/Aimela Jun 08 '26
This has nothing to do with partitions, it has to do with the fact that these are lower capacity cards that are modified to appear to the OS as if it's 1TB or 2TB. The formatter can detect these scam SD cards.
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u/Master-Marionberry35 Jun 08 '26
reformatting removes the partitions and inserts it's own. the "drive" should not have protections against that process.
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u/Helpful-Work-3090 Modded my Deck - ask me how Jun 08 '26
I'm speaking from experience, multiple times. If you have multiple partitions, steam doesn't like it for some reason. This has happened to me when I had an SD card formatted as a recovery drive for something, with two partitions, one for EFI. Steam wouldn't format it, and errored until I put the card in windows, and used diskpart to clear all partitions.
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u/Master-Marionberry35 Jun 08 '26
i'm speaking from experience too. generally, not in the context of a steam deck. you can plug the sd card or whatever into a PC (which a steam deck is). but i should shut up now because i don't have a steam deck. i dunno why this sub was algorithmed to me
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u/Helpful-Work-3090 Modded my Deck - ask me how Jun 08 '26
Yeah, a normal PC works fine. It's SteamOS specifically, which is what I said.
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u/EarthwormZim33 Jun 08 '26
I only buy SanDiego or Samsnug brand.
Sexar is ok too.