This is generally good advice, but the sophistication over the years of some of the fake Sandisk stuff as one example has meant at times even seemingly sound storefronts have become polluted with fakes.

I imagine all sorts of random commingling type activities have happened in Amazon warehouses over the years, there is so many avenues for convincing fake crap to accidentally get sold in mainstream sales channels.

I don't have a link, but I thought I saw that this was happening with name brand drives from third party sellers on Amazon as well. And given that Amazon co-mingles product, it's a crapshoot.

I don't think anyone is suggesting to intentionally buy scam drives.

IMO there are no trustable SSD and SD card brands. They are all bad.

reputable does not mean amazon. they hide random sellers on some products and lie they are from the oem on the product page.

half of premium kingston models I got from the did not fall under the obvious and amateur scam this tool detects... but were lower quality chips or outright QA failed units. that half always fails around the 3x capacity writes. so infuriating.