I've bought Sandisk 16gb sdhc from Ebay. Package and card look like they are original. When I access to card with my N900 and format it with the default file manager it says that the cards capacity is only 965,4mb!

I tried to access to card with my very old sd reader with adapter using winxp. I formated the card with windows explorer and it also says that the capacity is only 965,4mb. So is there any solution or is my new microsd card fake. Or what is going on?

how much did you pay for it? Might be fake. I had one that had unpartitioned space but I don't remember how i fixed it. Format should work.

Unfortunately buying SDHC cards from Ebay is among the most risky businesses possible. The vast majority of cards sold there are simply fakes, in the sense that they sell off small-sized cards as large SDHC cards.

The advice to everyone is to stay away from SDHC cards sold via Ebay.

Note, though, that very old SD readers won't be able to handle SDHC. In general you should also not have to format a new card, it's pre-formatted and ready for use. I've never ever reformatted a new card and I haven't had any trouble.

you should be able to check it with a partition editor and all that, I personally use gparted or fdisk in Linux (ubuntu live CDs make this easy). You should be able to see its size and all that before formatting.

That could be enough to see if it's a fake, but not enough to prove it's genuine.
I've bought a USB drive on eBay a while ago, supposed to be 16GB, it told the computer that it was really 16GB, but it wasn't.
Thanks to Paypal I got my money back.

I second the "stay away from eBay flash memory devices"

How does one come up with a statistic such as "the vast majority of cards sold there are simply fakes"?

I boycott Ebay in general for other reasons, but the only way I can think of backing such a statement as was made would be buying, say, 50 cards from various sellers and determining that way more than 25 were fake. Is that what happened?

geneven, the reason I came up with that statement was because there have been _tons_ of reports about this. All over the net. You always hear about some scam or another, for all kinds of products, but for SDHC cards this has been different. People consistently report about this. I can't even remember any post about getting legit, size-as-specified large-size SDHC cards off Ebay.
Also see:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/20...-sosfakeflash/

Likely fake, but Power Search this forum for the Panasonic formatting utility (if you have a Windows PC) and do a low-level format.

Why trash Ebay? I've had many successful transactions over there. That said, you should only deal with sellers with high scores (100 or close) and buy stuff that can be returned.

I'm on the net alot (hence my n900) and use ebay, but would never buy a cd, DVD, or sd card from there. Newegg or amazon is usually my choice for sd cards or amazon (not sellers on amazon). I pay a little more but I pay for trust in a business. My n900 was bought off newegg. On the other hand I just bought a zeemote off ebay, but I bought my 16gb microsdhc from newegg.