Corsair USB Flash Drives – Buying And Selling – A Guide

Are you interested in buying or selling Corsair USB flash drives? The Flash Survivor and Flash Voyager usb flash drives are well known. Excellent products with a 10 Year Limited Warranty. This is much higher then most brand names currently offer.

• If you want to buy one, could you buy it just anywhere?
• If you want to sell them could you buy them from any wholesalers?

Currently Corsair offers:

Flash Survivor CMFUSBSRVR-8GB 8GB CMFUSBSRVR-16GB 16GB CMFUSBSRVR-32GB 32GB Flash Voyager GT CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT 16GB

Flash Voyager CMFUSB2.0-4GB 4GB CMFUSB2.0-8GB 8GB CMFUSB2.0-16GB 16GB CMFUSB2.0-32GB 32GB CMFUSBHC-64GB 64GB

Flash Voyager Mini CMFUSBMINI-4GB 4GB CMFUSBMINI-8GB 8GB CMFUSBMINI-16GB 16GB

Note the capacity sizes offered for Flash Survivor, Flash Voyager GT or Flash Voyager and Flash Voyager Mini. There are no other capacities offered for these models by Corsair. You won’t find any 128GB, yet.

So where is the best to buy? Where is the cheapest price to be found? If you are a consumer, eBay would be the place – you would think. If you are a potential seller, from a wholesaler or wholesale internet site in China, seems logical.

Wrong. That fabulous 10 year limited warranty? Wave it goodbye. The only smart place to buy from if you are a consumer is from a Corsair authorized reseller, period. If you want to sell them, then you need to become an authorized reseller. It is not just about the warranty, it is the fact you are likely to acquire false capacity usb flash drive(s).

We will show you two things to help you understand:

1. Corsair’s Warning
2. A Victims Documented Corsair GT Voyager Fake.

Corsair’s Warning

Counterfeiting is a serious problem for flash nand memory based products. Corsair, just like all the other brand names is having it’s merchandise counterfeited.

The issue is serious enough that Corsair now publishes the fact at their support site. If a company does this, they do it because they have no choice and want to warn consumers. If you log in to http://www.corsair.com/helpdesk/default.aspx, then select Flash Memory followed by a Flash Voyager USB Pen Drive model you will see the following message:

NOTICE: Warning about counterfeit Corsair drives

Key is the following:

“We have recently seen some number of counterfeit Corsair drives available in the market, usually from unauthorized sellers or third party sites such as EBay”

SOSFakeFlash can confirm that the eBay is a third party site where counterfeit Corsair USB Flash Voyager have been sold. In fact, in the last year of SOSFakeFlash’s operation it is the only internet site reported so far where these counterfeits have been sold.

Many sellers hoping to make a large profit bought these counterfeits from wholesaling sites in the Orient, they then offered them on eBay. As a result, not only did these eBay sellers have many angry buyers, if reported to SOSFakeFlash with supporting evidence, their reputations permanently stained from having sold fake flash. SOSFakeFlash in the interest of eBay members issues internet alerts to warn people around the world. eBay has a global presence. Counterfeits are also false capacity devices. For usb flash drives, this spells disaster! Data loss. A consumer’s files gone for good.

A Victims Documented Corsair GT Voyager Fake

One eBay victim documented his purchase and also photographed the fake Flash Voyager GT 16GB in various stages of disassembly for the public to inspect. Anyone who wants to see what a fake Corsair usb flash drive looks like will want to read this article.

The photos are very large and detailed. The victim dubbed “CaptainVoyager” also has a sense of humour. You need to use your mouse over the photo’s to see the little captions.

Victim Of Counterfeit Flash Voyager GT 16GB and 32GB Purchased On eBay Creates A Visual Guide

CaptainVoyager takes you step by step right down the the circuit board. If you think you may have bought a counterfeit Corsair as a consumer or even as a seller you will want to compare your usb flash drive(s) against his.

The moral of the story for both buyers and sellers is to only buy Corsair Memory products from authorized resellers. If you return a counterfeit to Corsair there will be no warranty. Not only that, you will never see the usb flash drive again.

If you return a drive that is counterfeit, we will notify you that the drive is not genuine, and the drive will be discarded.

Don’t go looking for super cheap fabulously priced bargains. There aren’t any. You could lose your data, your money and even end up creating a website to present your fake counterfeit Corsair to the public and display your lesson learned.

Counterfeit Fake Transcend USB Flash Drives – Product Verification Validation

How do you tell a true Transcend USB Flash Drive from a Counterfeit (Fake – False Capacity)? Where can you check?

Transcend is the latest Brand Name to suffer from Counterfeiting for USB Flash Drives, joining Kingston and Sony. SOSFakeFlash recently received their first confirmation of a Transcend 32 JetFlash V30 USB Flash Drive being sold on eBay by seller hellopetpet. The Transcend 32 JetFlash V30 is only made up to 16GB in size. When SOSFakeFlash reviewed eBay for Transcend Flash drives it was not difficult to detect the true capacity from the counterfeits. Like Kingston, Transcend uses colour coding. Within a few minutes two other sellers were detected selling counterfeit Transcend 32 JetFlash V30 flash drives, ren-ren-buy and maya.city .

You should visit the Official Transcend site to check out what they sell. USB Flash Drives Made By Transcend

For older models, type the model in on google, then look for the transcend website. Like most manufacturers these days they don’t show an archive of older models, but like many sites, the pages are still there.

Transcend is very much aware of the counterfeiting of their products and have set up product verification.

In order to protect our customers rights and our superior brand image, we have set up this site to allow customers to verify the authenticity of their products.

Product Verification

Go to their webpage and verify the flash drive you bought. You can use it to check other products to see if they are genuine too. If you don’t see your drive, get a message that they did not make it, have doubts or questions, please contact them for help:

techsupport@transcend.com.tw

If you performed testing and found you bought a counterfeit, let them know. Tell them where you bought the item and from whom. The only way to put a stop to this problem is to help. You probably chose transcend to AVOID buying a fake in the first place. Let them know where you bought your counterfeit from!

If you need or want to test the real capacity of your usb flash drive see: H2testw 1.4 – Gold Standard In Detecting USB Counterfeit Drives If it turns out you bought it on eBay and is a fake, please Report A Fake to SOSFakeFlash.

Kingston USB Flash Drives – Detect Counterfeits And Fakes – Product Verification

Did you buy an 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 120GB or 128GB Kingston USB Flash drive you think is a fake or counterfeit? Countries in Asia are very vunerable to these counterfeit items, but Europe and even North America are experiencing an increase of these items circulating for sale. What does Kingston have to say? Is there a tool you can use to check quickly to determine if you have an authentic item? Yes Kingston is aware of the problem and they have set up a web page to help. Yes there is a tool. SOSFakeFlash also found technical support numbers you can call.

Fake Counterfeit Sony 16GB 32GB 60GB 64GB 120GB 240GB 260GB 360GB 500GB Micro Vault USB Flash Drives

Reprinted from FakeFlashNews.

First reported on eBay this article covers the history of these famous little fakes. Little because the actual capacity tends to be 512MB or less! They are the among the oldest fakes on the market and are sold by internet sites in China and Hong Kong. You will find information for the Sony website and also their email contact address to report your counterfeit.

You can now buy a genuine super sized fake Sony Micro Vault drive on eBay! These drives are designed for those who want a large capacity flash drive and are confident in Sony’s reputation. You can also buy less exotic versions with just the “Sony” brand name. These are special usb flash drives – designed to help you lose your precious data and of course empty your wallet too.

The fake flash sellers who are eager to sell to you on eBay come in many guises. Some set up respectable looking listings – very business like. Others sport the home grown look of a local seller just trying to offer something nice at a reasonable price. Others are very crafty. FakeFlashNews and SOSFakeFlash have already published other articles on the subject of counterfeits under the Sony brand name, just type “Sony” into the search box to see what is available at the site.

In this article we will cover the latest seller discovered on eBay – lozzy_17, Sony Electronics Warning and Help, Where to find the real models produced by Sony and also present historical background on Alerts to Fake Sony Flash drives. We are even have the 16 report written by BJ Gleason available for download.

Just this week Zahid issued urgent alerts at SOSFakeFlash about an ebay seller lozzy_17. Zahid has been paroling eBay for suspicious listings – he read the warning issued about Private Auctions by SOSFakeFlash and the need for volunteers to help. We fell off our chairs – What? Somebody is selling a 500GB Flash Memory Drive? You’ve got to be kidding! There aren’t going to be drives like that available to the public for several years. Why? They are not there yet in technology – miniaturizing the flash chips so they are the same size at current USB memory sticks will take some work! Selling at a consumer affordable price, that will also be a challenge. Right now the highest available size is 64GB and come from manufacturers of memory chips.

This article is a MUST Read for anyone who has a Sony Counterfeit, needs help for a Sony counterfeit flash drive or wants to know what is a real or not real for Sony Flash Drives.