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Quality Concerns For Kingston microSD Cards
Andrew "bunnie" Huang, whom we've discussed before for his book on Xbox hacking and development of the Chumby, has made an interesting blog post about problems he's found with Kingston microSD cards. He first encountered a batch of bad cards during production of the ChumbyOne, and found Kingston initially unhelpful when trying to get them replaced. After noticing some unusual markings on the chips, he decided to investigate for himself, comparing the ID data and dissolving the cards' casings with nitric acid to take a look inside. He found that each of his Kingston-branded samples actually had a Toshiba/SanDisk memory chip inside, and that the batch of low-quality cards he received may not be as uncommon as he thought.
"Significantly, Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging. Every Kingston card surprisingly had a SanDisk/Toshiba memory chip inside, and the only variance or 'value add' that could be found is in the selection of the controller chip. ... This tells me that Kingston must be crushed when it comes to margin, which may explain why irregular cards are finding their way into their supply chain. Kingston is also probably more willing to talk to smaller accounts like me because as a channel brand they can't compete against OEMs like Sandisk or Samsung for the biggest contracts from the likes of Nokia or RIMM. Effectively, Kingston is just a channel trader and is probably seen by SanDisk/Toshiba as a demand buffer for their production output. I also wouldn't be surprised if SanDisk/Toshiba was selling Kingston 'A-' grade parts, i.e., parts with slightly more defective sectors, but otherwise perfectly serviceable. As a result, Kingston plays a significant and important role in stabilizing microSD card prices and improving fab margins, but at some risk to their own brand image."
The re-purchase of silicon at many levels is a pretty common thing. Somebody comes out with a good memory chip and the world buys wafers of the chip from the other vendor. Or in a final package, or pays for their name on the outside of the package.
I have had several experiences with foundries taking a design, fabricating it for me, and then 6 months to a year later a "sister organization" comes out with a chip that looks pretty bloody similar. Then, when you do a tear-down of the competitor's chip (nitric acid and a microscope) and you find your design inside the thing. Lawsuit time if you can, but what usually happens is some form of licensing agreement.
What I would question here is what testing of the chip was done after it was assembled. Test time costs a lot of money to do, and anything that can be done to reduce that is a common strategy. Sometimes they do "blind package assembly" (no testing at the wafer level) and do testing just after final assembly.
In this case it sounds like they are doing blind assembly, and shipping out with no final test either. A shoddy way to cut costs.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Actually, the new kenmore's are made by LG ;)
Its probably a surprise to a lot of people who dont investigate brands or dont understand why Kingston flash fails more often than other flash. Every so often we need to be reminded that "you get what you pay for" still works. Everytime I go to a deal site, I see Kingston RAM or flash on sale. I usually avoid them because I know they dont make their own stuff, but sometimes I'll pick some up for an application that doesnt need the best parts like disposable USB drives or RAM for a htpc.
Yup. real hard: http://www.appliance411.com/purchase/sears.shtml
It's actually a very common scenario, even with much bigger vendors. Belkin and Netgear both just buy whatever chips are going cheap that month and slap them in plastic case, which is why they have V1, V2, V3, V4v1, V4v2 and so on revisions of their products all of which need different drivers.
It's a way of pushing down costs. In PHB speak it's called being "agile" with supply. Particularly with memory cards which don't need drivers it is impossible to tell what chips you are going to get.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I totally avoid buying sandisk products since my experiences with sandisk cruzer thumb drives at work.
It doesn't tell you anywere on the packaging that it forces you into a totally horrible marketing idea....
When you plug in a Sandisk Cruzer it appears as two drives. The first drive is a small read-only drive (presumably a rom) that is configured to auto-install unnecessary windows drivers and other miscellaneous bloatware every time you plug the usb drive in. You can't disable or hide this drive at all. The best you can do is turn off autorun in windows (which was always a crappy idea anyway). The drivers/utilities are totally redundant in that if you never install them you can still access the user drive as normal.
Its particularly annoying of Sandisk to make a product that:
a) just assumes you must be using windows.
b) Under widnows, the lower drive letter is the ROM, not the user space.
c) Its downright rude that it just auto-installs drivers with no user confirmation or control.
You are a moron:
A: The work fine in every OS I've ever tried them with
B: You are worried about the drive letter enumeration here? are you kidding me?
C: Windows auto installs the drivers. Not SanDisk
D: The U3 feature can easily be turned off so the drive looks like any other cheaper flash drives.
you sir need to RTFM before tou bitch about how bad something is you have no business commenting on.
"It doesn't tell you anywere on the packaging that it forces you into a totally horrible marketing idea...."
That surprises me. U3-enabled drives get HEAVILY marketed as such.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What class of SD cards are you using? The higher the class, the faster the write speed (fastest currently available that I know of is Class 6). See this wikipedia article for more information.
You are no well informed. Many other 'brands' put SLC chips in their cards. SLC is more expensive and marketed to the professional channel. Transcend, AData Sandisk, Lexar and many other brands use SLC. In fact based on the information in this study I would question Kingstons SLC quality, because if they do the same thing with SLC that they do with MLC the controllers are cheap and reduce the performance.
Advertised speed class is different from actual quality. For instance, many off-branch CompactFlash cards do not support DMA - they are supposed to by the specification, but since little end equipment actually used DMA modes until very recently, very few people noticed. This is the same for SPI mode in SD cards (though not a requirement in microSD).
No, you did not.
Through the miracles of emulation, a U3 device (such as the Sandisk drives being discussed here) presents itself as two physically separate USB peripherals, along with a virtualized USB hub to connect them to the host. One of them is a USB CD-ROM, and the other is a USB storage device.
The emulated storage device only has one partition on it, which fills the entire available area of the disk (as limited by hardware). Read more about it at Wikipedia.
This is a special function of the hardware, not just a partition table trick. You can write zeros over the entire accessible thing, and U3 will survive.
It takes magic to turn this function off. GParted does not include such magic.
Kid-proof tablet..
I usually avoid them because I know they dont make their own stuff
That's ostensibly an advantage. Every fab turns out some turkeys and bad lots. If Kingston has good QA they can find and re-sell the best and reject the rest. If.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)