I want to buy a 1 or 2 Terabyte memory card. Does not matter if it is a thumb drive or an SD card. (Just need it for backup.)
But I have read all about phony memory cards (say they are 256gb but actually 16gb, etc.) and am not sure where to buy a real one?
I’m looking on Amazon and seeing 1 Terabyte thumb drives for under $40. I am not sure if these are for real or not?
Is Amazon a reliable place to buy these memory cards? (Certainly NOT ebay!)
I looked at the SanDisk web site and one of their distributors is B & H photo in New York. They have prices like $300 or $200 for a 512 SD memory card.
There’s only a couple of real 1 TB thumb drives and SD cards on the market and they’re very expensive. If you need that much space for backup, you should get an external hard drive.
It looks like newegg.com does not have 1TB USB flash drives. The biggest at 512MB. This also seems to be the maximum size for SD cards. Micro SD cards seem to max out at 200MB. Based on that I would worry that any USB thumb drive saying it was 1 TB is fraud. I see some reports about Kingston having a 1TB thumb drive. But it is not on their website. They only show the 512MB drive. Amazon does list a 1TB kingston drive for about $1,000. But it is from a third party seller so I would be worried.
I bought a 256GB thumb drive in NYC a year ago and IIRC I paid about $70 at Best Buy. Works great, Prices vary wildly. I see they now sell the PNY 256GB for about $50, and a 512GB for $200. I see a Canadian store carrying Kingston Data Traveler 1TB for $C 1315, or about $US1,000. it looks pretty clunky and big.
So yes, if you see a 1TB thumb drive or SD card for under $500, most likely a scam. If it was a regularly available item, you would have no problem finding it at Best Buy, Staples, or your local computer store.
Second that. I have several external hard drives that work fine. For backup purposes, you don’t need the speed of flash memory. And the one-terabyte drives are more affordable. Best Buy has a WD My Passport 1TB drive for about sixty bucks.
But if you’re going to need more storage later, buy a bigger one now. The incremental cost is slight.
I looked on the Amazon Christmas 2017 website and it’s $12.39.
I had a friend who absolutely could not, would not carry four 32GB sticks for his traveling research files, and insisted on paying the uber-premium price for two 64’s right when they came out. This was a guy who pinched pennies so hard Abe Lincoln screamed. Even as a tech ween myself, I can’t understand the mindset of people who can’t live with last week’s technology until this week’s drops to a reasonable price.
I usually use Pricewatch to shop for components. The biggest USB flash drives they have a category for are 512 GB (cheapest at the moment $175.98.) The biggest SD card they have a category for is 256 GB (only one listed, and it is $179.85.)
The Kingston website does not show the 1TB version as available. I wonder if that $1,239.04 is really going to get you the 1TB drive? They talk about a 1TB version but only list the 512 for sale. Maybe they made a few but the yield was crappy so they stopped for a while. https://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business/DTHXP30
Which is the opposite type of pricing mistake as I saw just now. While I was at Pricewatch anyway, I was browsing some HD prices, and found this1 TB drive for $26.32 with $6872.89 shipping.
There are some USB 1TB SSDs - Samsung T3, for example. These are larger than your typical flash drive, and connect via a cable rather than plugging directly into a USB port. They’re still quite a bit smaller than a portable hard drive.
I agree about HDDs for backup, but just wanted to note that USB flash drives aren’t necessarily fast just because they’re solid state. Unlike SSDs, their write speeds are often actually a good deal slower than conventional HDDs, sometimes very much slower, depending on make and generation. For SD cards, because write speeds can be a critical factor in high-end still cameras and video recorders, they are classified in four standardized write speed categories and two additional high-speed categories for video recording, and the fast ones are correspondingly more expensive. USB flash drives have no such standardized classification but their speeds do vary a lot between makes and models.
I did not know that but it’s another reason the OP should just buy an external HDD. I prefer the 2.5" external drives, as they don’t need a power adapter but instead can just be powered off the USB cable.
I watched a video on youtube checking an obviously fake 1 TB thumb drive that cost $40 on amazon. He showed some tools that can be used to check the drives. Kind of interesting.
SSD would be more durable if you carry it around all the time and expect it to be bumped & dropped from time to time. But otherwise I agree a hard drive would be far more cost-effective.
Also nobody has answered the OP directly about Amazon. You shouldn’t automatically trust all sellers on Amazon - there are lots of shady sellers who sell through Amazon. If it’s sold by Amazon (“Ships from and sold by Amazon.com”) it should be OK. If not, always check the seller ratings. Personally I’d never buy anything expensive from a seller who doesn’t have hundreds of ratings and at least 98% positive ratings. And never buy from sellers that say “E-mail us at … before placing order.”
You don’t need anything very sophisticated. I just copy a folder the same size as the drive to it, and then run a bit-comparison check with the original (Toast has a nice utility that does that).
I’ve been using the My Passport terabyte drive for a year or so, and it works fine. When my laptop died in January, I’d already backed it up onto the Passport, and copied its files from there onto my desktop hard drive. It’s small, light (“is that a terabyte in your pocket or are you glad to see me?”), and I can plug it into any computer anywhere that has a USB port.
And as Dewey says, you can get one for sixty bucks. OP, unless you really need your external drive to be a thumb drive, get a My Passport.
