What about offbrand/unbranded Memory Cards?

[Neon Henchman]

I was buying a couple of 1019 Blocks Nintendo Memory Cards for my GameCube and I thought about taking a few 251 Blocks ones, but I came upon an offbrand one that did interested me as it has 1024MB of space (if it's the same as HDE's, you can cycle through 8 seperate pages of 2000+ Blocks by clicking the button on it). I was just going to use it just for backups and replays, but then I came to a review which you can see in the image.



The person on eBay talked about how unbranded Memory Cards lack a grounding plate and can possibly fry the system. That's quite a bit of concern for me as I don't want to break my consoles, but then I realised that, in all my years playing GameCube games, I always used Hip Gear's 251 Blocks Memory Cards which does lack those grounding plates, and yet they never failed me once.

So my question, are the person's claims founded? Should I resort to use only grounded Memory Cards so to keep my console safe? Give me all the details about those, I think this forum would have the best answer.

Here's the unbranded Memory Card I said I'm interested in: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/1024MB-Game-Mem ... 2749.l2649

[capzlk]

I own this card, it works fine but I would recommend to not get one. The paging doesn't work well while a game is running causing situations where your save is on page 2 but the card is on page 1 and no way to get to it other than to restart the gamecube.. That night be fine, unless you use Swiss for some patches, at which point it becomes annoying.

It holds data just fine, it's the paging that's annoying. I've ordered an original Nintendo card as a result.

No idea about the dangers of grounding.. Never had a problem with my 3rd party cards (I've had 3)

[Neon Henchman]

Finally found the time to see the thread.

Okay, the grounding was specifically what I was worried about, so I shouldn't mind it too much? I'll keep using my Hip Gear memory cards then. I also take note of that about the one I linked.

[boredomca]

Madcatz has some 16X I've never had a problem with, 16 year old files still there.
The extended WII GameCube style memory cards are the only ones I've had problems with personally.
Never used anything super jank/cheap though like China clones