Disclaimer: This contains some language that is hidden in the fourth spoiler. Other than that, the rest of the entry is clean.

Disclaimer the second: There's some light computer jargon, and if that's not your thing, your head may hurt.

This is my Samsung Galaxy S4. (ignore the Toshiba laptop it's sitting on. I needed a surface that contrasted with the color of the phone lol)

I love my phone. It’s the first phone I’ve had that my parents weren’t paying the phone bill. That’s no fun to pay your own bill, but at least there’s some privacy in paying your own phone bill. Like, they don’t see where I go on there, and that’s good because I really don’t want them knowing I’m an active fan of My Little Pony.

So before I begin and for future reference, SD stands for Secure Digital.

For a while now I’ve had a 32 GB SD card in my phone. It came out of my old Motorola Electrify. I have a lot of high definition video (hours upon hours of 720p and 1080p content) and high fidelity audio (I re-ripped all my CDs to WAV and downloaded all my Bandcamp/Beatport content in FLAC) stored on this memory card. So much so that it’s completely full. I decided it’s time for an upgrade. So I went to my Walmart and looked at 64 GB SD cards. The per-gigabyte cost of an SD card rivals that of a solid state drive. Seriously, it does. The cost of that 64 GB card was $60. About 94¢ per gigabyte. I got my 128 GB SSD for about $150, excluding the cost of shipping and that equates to about $1.17 per gigabyte. And you can get a 1,000 GB hard drive for $70 (or 7¢ per gigabyte). The price of SD cards is awfully high, and I wasn’t going to pay that kind of premium for that card.

So I did some online shopping and I stumbled across this.

.

A Samsung 64 GB Micro SD card. It was going for $30. I felt like it was a no-brainer. And they were selling fast. I also felt like it’d be cool to have a Samsung SD card for my Samsung phone. So, hastily, I placed an order for one on Thursday while they were in stock. On Saturday, I started looking into the formats for SD cards because I was curious as to how big an SD card can get. Turns out Micro SDXC supports capacities up to 2 terabytes! Incredible. So I was looking at the photo of the memory card I bought. Because I get antsy when waiting for things to come in the mail. I mean, I paid for it so I should get my stuff, right? I’m a little impatient like that. But as I was looking at the photo, I noticed something peculiar. A 64 GB SD card that uses the SDHC format?

Okay, I’m a computer guy. I love working with tech. For those of you who don’t know, right now, there are 3 formats of SD card. That’s explained in the spoiler.

I know that SDHC only supports capacities up to 32 GB. I bought my old SD card before there was SDXC and there was no such thing as a 64 GB SD card at the time. SDHC tops out at 32 GB. So how, then, did this card manage to have a capacity of 64 GB while being SDHC format? I went on Amazon to read reviews on this particular card.

It has 2 stars. The 5 star reviews were obviously scammers trying to make it look legit. But of the 48 reviews, 36 of them were for 1 star. Wanna know the titles of those reviews? “Counterfeit.” “Fake.” “Don’t buy.” “Knock-off.”

Womp womp. Guess who feels like an idiot. Yep. Me. But I wanted to give it a try. So when I got it in the mail today, I did. No success. It does nothing. I can’t put anything on it. And I should have known, too. I’m not mad because I got scammed. I’m mad because I should have known better than to jump on that. The rule of thumb is: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

So I want to warn you against these because if you’re not paying attention, everything is very convincing. I mean, you've got to give them props for making it look so so good that you'd think it's legit. But I’m usually so detail oriented, I normally would have been able to tell this was a scam from the beginning.

But be honest. Unless it’s used, there’s no way a legit 64 GB SD card is going to only run you $30.

Usually, you’re safest visiting your local computer/electronics store or Walmart. They’ll likely have a return policy if it doesn't work.

If you take nothing else from this, just always remember to look up what you're looking at on a review site like Amazon. Even if the product you're looking at sells out and it was legit, you'll have other opportunities to get what you want.

In the meantime, I’m going to go smack myself for being so dumb. Gah! I should have known better!

SanDisk is best.