***WARNING. Do not buy deeply discounted SDXC flash media off ebay****
The new generation of recorders and music players are capable of using the super high capacity SDXC and micro SDXC cards, so I'm sure more and more of us will be trying to hunt down the most economical options for SDXC media. I wanted to make everyone aware of a major internet scam that's going on where fake cards are being distributed with false labeling.
The bottom line of the scam is people are selling cards on ebay that look like they're deeply discounted brand name high capacity cards, but in reality they're cheap small cards dressed in sheeps clothing. These cards are bootlegs...they have all of the same packaging down to the labeling of the actual card. The scam works really well because most people don't realize they've been scammed until much MUCH later (and some may never realize they've been scammed) since the cards will seem to format properly in their machine (somehow your machine will format and show you that you have, for example, a card with 128GB of storage space). So you start using the card and it works just fine...UNTIL you exceed the REAL capacity of the card. So oftentimes you've paid a price thinking you've received a 128gb card but you actually received a 2gb or 4gb card instead. It works fine in your camera or recorder until you exceed that much data. That's when you start having problems...files appear in your directory, but then they disappear after transferring the files (since they were never there in the first place)...files you thought you'd recorded are never recorded, etc. The scam is effective because a lot of people don't find out until two, three, four months later that their card is bad because they haven't filled the card up enough to learn that they have a fake.
There are a number of ways to detect a fake card. Do a google search to find various methods people have used.
The bottom line here is that you should buy your flash media from reputable dealers...don't buy from ebay. You're going to pay more than the discounted prices you see on ebay for sure, and I know it can be tempting to take a chance on getting a good card at a cheap price, but unfortunately I think you just have to assume that the media on ebay is all going to be fake.
Learn from my mistake and save yourself in the long run.