I hope this will help some people as I kind of stumbled on this information when a friend purchased a fake 4gb card and was having problems. I've just combined all the information into a set of three tests that can help you determine whether the card you have is fake and more importantly if its any good. If there are any other ways to test the cards please do share.
Test 1
This is well known test, from the XMB go to either music, game or video. Select the memory stick press the triangle button, select information and if it says Magic gate Unknown then its a Fake. Hopefully everyone will know this test.
Test 2
Ok so you know you've bought a fake so how do you test if its any good?
Some fake sticks are just old 128mb, 256mb, 1gb cards tweaked and rebadged at a higher capacity. They show up with the correct amount of storage and format fine, its just when you copy data to them that they simply don't work properly.
To test this you will need:
The fake 4gb card that I copied data to, all data I copied to the 256mb mark was giving same checksums, when copying anything above 256mb I was getting different checksums and games were not showing, loading or playing. That card went back, and ordered one from play.com instead.
That said you can still possibly have a fake card with no crc errors so at least you know that aspect of the fake card won't give you problems.
Test 3
Some games slow down during play, and i've read that this can be attributed to fake cards (assuming they are in an uncompressed iso format). There is a benchmarking tool available called Blackspeedv2 (from here: http://www.xquaker.com/bs/bsv2.rar) which you have run it on your psp it will give you a performance index speed.
As a guide:
Test 1
This is well known test, from the XMB go to either music, game or video. Select the memory stick press the triangle button, select information and if it says Magic gate Unknown then its a Fake. Hopefully everyone will know this test.
Test 2
Ok so you know you've bought a fake so how do you test if its any good?
Some fake sticks are just old 128mb, 256mb, 1gb cards tweaked and rebadged at a higher capacity. They show up with the correct amount of storage and format fine, its just when you copy data to them that they simply don't work properly.
To test this you will need:
- Connect your card to your pc either through a card reader (Preffered) or connected via the PSP.
- Copy around 128mb data to card, a game or similar will do.
- Once copied you need to run a checksum (same as the .SFV files you get with releases to test archives) on the files you just copied and compare with the files copied over. You can use QuickSFV or Rapid CRC or your own preferred program to generate the checksums.
- Now repeat steps 2 and 3 but fill the data up to 256mb / 512mb / 1gb / 2gb / 4gb each time depending on the size of your card.
The fake 4gb card that I copied data to, all data I copied to the 256mb mark was giving same checksums, when copying anything above 256mb I was getting different checksums and games were not showing, loading or playing. That card went back, and ordered one from play.com instead.
That said you can still possibly have a fake card with no crc errors so at least you know that aspect of the fake card won't give you problems.
Test 3
Some games slow down during play, and i've read that this can be attributed to fake cards (assuming they are in an uncompressed iso format). There is a benchmarking tool available called Blackspeedv2 (from here: http://www.xquaker.com/bs/bsv2.rar) which you have run it on your psp it will give you a performance index speed.
As a guide:
- An original Sandisk 4gb from play.com gave me a Performance Index (PI) of 581
- A genuine Sandisk 1gb stick from SVP gave me a PI score of 520.
- A fake Sony 2gb stick from fleabay gave me a PI score of 281 although the capacity is ok and i've maxed the capacity without problems. Speed wise I managed to play (and complete) both grand theft auto games with no apparent slow down due to the card.
