eBay says there are currently 9999 available and it ends this Saturday. While there are normally no shortage of such listings I thought this was a particurlarly low price and probably has to do with the rising Aussie Dollar. I realise many of us may immediately suspect quality, but with the eBay 'protections' it seems like a worthwhile purchase… plus they indicate that the internals are Samsung.
If they are indeed fake, you can always get your money back with paypal or if you used your credit card you can do a reverse transfer.
Hence why the person who posted this said "but with the eBay ‘protections’ it seems like a worthwhile purchase"
wont these be fakes?
Can never know if its a fake when bought from ebay.
FAKE! dont buy!! look at that crappy sticker saying 16gb rofl
they r usually 1gb or 2gb usb sticks… don't buy them
check out on ebay .. and look at feedback
Fake? Well then there must be thousands of similar fakes from sellers that obviously have positive feedback from the sale of these items.
There are a lot idiots who are fooled into thinking they're getting what they paid for and then leave positive feedback.
This is not the place to pimp your own eBay btw.
you don't realise its fake until you put more than 2gb of data on it and the rest gets corrupted / disappears. they appear as 16gb when you go to properties, most people wouldn't fill it up and test it before leaving positive feedback. I always run my flash drives through h2testw before leaving feedback - you get an idea of the read/write speeds and the capacity of the drive.
"(30 times than floppy driver)"
what's a floppy driver ???
Woo "Driveless for Mac OS 9X or up" — does that mean I can get my 16gb without even needing the USB drive? If so, sign me up..or not…
Okay thanks to your sharp criticisms, speculation and censorship I have purchased one myself. I shall let you know how it goes in a few weeks, and while I may have to eat humble pie I am optimistic that if it is not as described or fake then a refund or replacement shouldn't be too difficult.
Have you ever dealt with PayPal when something goes wrong? Lets just say it will be easier and less stressful for you to just whore yourself out for $13.50 on any street corner.
I have dealt with Paypal when something has gone wrong and it definitely can be very stressful (especially when you've spent a lot of money).
In the end it is only a matter of your psyche and how much you value that money. If it's fake, all you've lost is time as you'll get your money back eventually (and if you go through paypal they'll actually say that it's illegal for you to post the item back…so you wouldn't have to worry about return fees)
inherentchoice: I think what these people are trying to say is that, if it's too good to be true…then it most probably is. Also check the ratings of the seller, notice how he's relatively low and has never sold electronics before <- bad sign.
Not only would it be too good to be true, it'd also be a statistical anomaly for the item to be the capacity described. Why bother taking the risk when it is more than likely to be fake or just plain break after a few months with all your important data on it?
Buy this item if you like a gamble in life, you never know, you might just get a great bargain. Or you could just go down to Crown Casino, put it all on red and have much better odds!
Neg as above. In many cases, cheap flash drives from eBay are hacked so they appear to be a certain capacity. However, you either cannot fill them to capacity, or you may appear to fill it to capacity, but when you go to access the data you will either get errors or the data just plain disappears.
For interest, h2testw is a good tool for determining if your flash media is actually legit or not.
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold…
Thanks for the link. I was scammed a few years ago on an SD card - Aussie seller too. Better to deal with more trustworthy sellers.
The scammers may be utter trash, but lets have a round of applause for the altruistic folks running eBay! Haven't they just gone above and beyond the call of duty to stop these scumbags from ripping off unsuspecting buyers without consideration for their own loss of revenue from fraudulent listings? :(
Sorry, I'm pouring the sarcasm on but I just can't get enough of it to drip here to relay my disgust! ;)
Lol I just got this message:
You are temporarily banned on OzBargain from posting new deals due to excessive negative votes on your deals over the last 5 days.
Until now I didn't really mind the negative votes but I just tried to submit a genuine freebie 'valued' at $40. I guess that will have to wait then. I hope they don't run out of stock.
Seriously I would never vote negative out of suspicion, and it appears only GreenGuava shed any real light on it while the rest of you seemed to take the too good to be true = not true approach. As I said before, I shall let you know if your claims prove correct. I really only wanted to post this to see what the reaction would be. I guess I found out.
Sorry to hear that mate. Personally, I had no intention of getting you banned from posting deals.
Anyways, let us know how the USB drive goes when you get it. I'll be interested to see what h2testw 1.4 (website mentioned above or available directly from here: http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/bo/downloads/h2testw_1.4.zi…) comes up with when the drive is put through its paces.
Nah, I'm not asking for sympathy or anything, and sorry if it seems like I'm whinging as I don't mean to. I just felt I should mention that just to clarify my perspective and help to show both sides…
I certainly will test it with h2testw and post the results ;-) (you'll see I voted your comment positive at the outset).
Given your previous positive history, IMHO you have a right to feel a bit disappointed by a ban for such a few negs here! Maybe it's an auto ban script, so perhaps if you had a yak to one of the mods they might be able to use their discretion to amend it! ;)
FWIW, I almost got stung by a "too good to be true" USB deal on ebay a while back; the item was a 64gb Kingston DT150, photo looked ridgy-didge, very convincing story about how he came to have them to be offloaded at low cost; and some positive feedback (either premature as mentioned, or sock-puppets)! Alarm bells rang when the unit wasn't on Kingston's site, and a quick email to them revealed no such model at that time! Nearly got me though! :(
Okay, got it in the mail today, and after letting H2testw run for a full 86 mins it gave this result:
Error writing file 'J:\10.h2w', offset 0x2a900000.
It is still possible to verify the test data written up to this point.
(The system cannot find the file specified. Code 2)
Warning: Only 15951 of 15984 MByte tested.
Writing speed: 1.92 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
After the test windows now says its capacity is 0 kb and I need to format. H2testw says error accessing the device.
Anyway, I'm glad you all negged it, and I'll have to see now if paypal will come through as I'm the owner of a supposedly 16gb USB that's only good for 10gb and seems slow…
I would never trust an eBay seller with a flash drive. They're almost all fake!
Damn it I meant to hit neg but hit the positive instead.