fake memory stick adapter?

Man... I've been having problems with my PhotoFast CR-5400 adapter I bought back in March.

Last night I was playing Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron on my PSP... I was playing the Galactic Conquest mode, and I wanted to save the game before I quit. When I went to do so, the memory stick light was flashing for a long time... way longer than it should be-- it usually saves game data in 1-2 seconds. After flashing for like 30 seconds it finally came back to me with a "Game save failed" message. So I tried it again, and again another save fail.

So I just exited the game & checked out the data at the XMB save data menu. Sure enough there were 2-3 corrupted files. Very odd. When I tried to delete them on my PSP, the delete failed! Not good.

I then hooked up my PSP to my PC in USB mode, went in to see these folders/files, tried to delete them. I managed to delete 1 folder with files inside them by deleting the files 1 at a time. But there are 2 corrupted folders that Windows won't allow me to delete! What's worse, when I come out of PSP>SAVEDATA my PC stops detecting any info on my PSP at all! Yikes...... NOT GOOD AT ALL.

So I turned off my PSP & charged it overnight. This morning I turned it on, when it got to the XMB, there was NO MEMORY STICK icon at all, and the memory stick light was pulsing... like once per second. This looked very, very bad.

I restarted the PSP, same problem. Then I put the PSP into sleep mode, and turned it back on. The memory stick showed up normally, with all the data it should have. I'm glad I can still access it. But I can tell it's going to fail again, and this is the end for it.

I think it's the adapter, it's possible it could be the cards, which is really bad since they cost so much. I dug out the adapter packaging, as show in the pic above, and checked out that page put out by PhotoFast on how to spot fake adapters. I noticed that my packaging doesn't have shiny silver lettering, it's just plain white. I'm thinking that the adapter I got from DealExtreme is probably fake.

I do have a rule when buying products from places like Deal Extreme who sell a lot of fakes: never buy a battery or memory cards from these types of places. If it's just a hunk of plastic like a battery cover, it probably doesn't matter if it's "real" or fake, but actual electronic stuff-- as long as you know what you're getting. I sorta broke the rule by buying that adapter, but it was the only place I knew of that shipped to Canada.

And for 8 months, it worked awesome. I haven't had any problems with it at all until now. It's just strange that it would go after all this time. Usually fakes make themselves known right away; they generally don't work right out of the gate. Maybe shoddy materials just couldn't take the stress over the 8 months of use?

I just ordered another CR-5400 adapter from a Canadian site... I really hope it's authentic, as I paid a lot more for it than at Deal Extreme. As long as it's authentic, it'll be worth it.


later
don