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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."
That's a lot of conjecture based on only two pieces of evidence. That'll never put OJ away, Marcia.
"Significantly, Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging"
And that is a surprise because? Of course that's what Kingston does - they don't own any fabs.
why is this news?
Your Kenmore dishwasher is really a Whirlpool and Kirkland jeans are Wranglers. This is news how? Are we supposed to be impressed by this guys over analysis of what everybody already knew went on?
http://xkcd.com/691/
The CB App. What's your 20?
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
It's becoming highly unreliable. Advances in error correction are plugging some of the holes, but you can expect to start to see real problems soon, especially with cheap brands where they don't up their controller quality (the controller has the ECC) to compensate for the low-grade NAND they buy.
As to Bunnie, I was pretty sure he'd been around the block already. Of course Kingston just repackages other people's NAND chips. There's only something like 7 manufacturers of NAND, and even that counts Intel and Micron separately even though they both sell the same designs every time. What did Bunnie think was in iPhones and XBox 360s? Apple and Microsoft don't make NAND either!
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required '/usr/www/users/xenatera/bunniestudios/blog/index.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in Unknown on line 0
I really don't care from where they source their NAND Flash. Kingston gets a big plus in my book, because they are the only vendor that sells SLC-based SD and CF cards (also some USB drives). All other manufacturers just put MLC chips in their devices and hide this fact under a lot of meaningless glitz.
FYI, the SLC-based Kingston cards are the Elite Pro line of SD and FC cards. It's the only kind I'd confidently use in my netbook as an additional SSD drive.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I now will add Kingston to my exclusion list... This is starting to make sense. I think Kingston's quality issues are also prevalent in their regular product line-up. I've had quality issues only on Kingston products come to think of it... this posting now confirms my suspicions. Too bad they didn't repsond to the posters concerns because it tells me they don't deserve my business.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
All they ever were was a slick rebranding excercise, with a useful online tool to select the correct memory if you were a dumbass.
If you're going to buy rebranded memory at least do so from someone who puts quality first, eg Mushkin.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
It's extremely common... I've bought 4 Kingston MicroSD cards, all but 1 are dead in a year. A-DATA and other brands work fine, so I'm sure it's a problem with Kingston's quality control.
Putting one badge on the top and having memory from another manufacturer is extremely common, but it's more surprising for a big brand.
Kingston's warranty departmen was meh. I sent in a couple of the cards that were defective and got 2 more cards that died quickly a month after sending them in.
On a side note, Kingston's rebate house sucks and Kingston refused to resolve a properly filled rebate rejection. With Corsair and OCZ using reputable rebate houses, working memory, and good, quick repair, I now ignore Kingston when purchasing.
Yes, they use other companies' chips because they don't have a fab. Most companies don't have a fab. They buy from whomever is cheapest, manufacture it, and ship it. Sorry they had a bad batch and had poor customer service, but that's par for the course nowadays. Did you stop buying WD and Seagate drives because they had bad batches? They sure as hell did, as did every other manufacturer.
So I look at this post and see it as a hit piece. Why is slashdot even posting it?
I think you're complaining about the annoying U3 program that they use. You are completely WRONG about not being able to disable. In fact, SanDisk provides a tool to remove it completely. I had to do it to my USB thumb drive, as well as a few members of my family.
Just search for "Sandisk U3 removal" and you will find the tool you need.
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.
The thing you are referring to is the "U3" system. It's a portable apps-ish thing.
It's easy to remove with their tool.
http://apac.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1415
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Its not ROM just a partition; if you don't like just go into computer management and remove it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I recall when i built my first computer in 2000 that Kingston was a reliable brand at a reasonable price. Back in those pre-newegg days, buying computer parts was like the wild west, so brand was very important. The last memory card I bought from Kingston was cheap, but it stopped working within a few months. I read reviews of the card and realized it wasn't a fluke; Kingston had sold out.
I always find it sad when a company that I perceived as dependable and trustworthy sells out. I can understand why it happens: the CEO, in an effort to boost profits, cuts costs and loosens standards, effectively selling their brand name/good will for short-term profits. The CEO looks great; people are buying just as many of the product, but the margins are higher. By the time consumers realize the brand is now worth less (or even worthless), the CEO has cashed his bonus checks and can retire or move to another company.
I'm hoping that Toyota is bringing visibility to this problem. The extra profits Toyota made whoring out its brand will pale in comparison to its losses. Kingston is fortunate to be in an industry where brand name is no longer as important as turning up on the front page of slickdeals.
Your description suggests that you have been bitten by "U3". It is, indeed, a thoroughly vile technology, of which Sandisk(among others) is inordinately fond. It essentially does nothing that http://portableapps.com/ can't; but with infinitely more suck.
After sufficient user outcry they, at long last, provided a (proprietary, Windows only) uninstaller for this "valuable feature". I'd still encourage you to punish Sandisk for their sins by withholding future purchases; but the uninstaller should at least make the stuff you already own suck a little less.
"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?
I do anyway after one of their reps took issue with me taking issue over the pulsing led they use on the Cruzer Titanium I bought on the Sandisk Cruzer forum. It's a thoroughly distracting and unecessary "feature" that bugged the hell out of me and I wanted it off. His answer was that, if I didn't like it, I shouldn't have taken it out of its box in the first place and plenty of people like it so why don't I just shut the hell up?
Charmers.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
"Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging"
Since when is this news? Isn't this known as Kingston's business model since forever?
At least I've never known any different. I just trusted them to have better than average quality product, execpt for high-end desktop or notebook memory, where they were merely average.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A nail salon should be able to match up a color with your titanium cruzer so that you can just paint over top of that offending light.
Some people like the light for debugging purposes.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
"I had to do it to my USB thumb drive, as well as a few members of my family."
I couldn't get the U3 software off my family.
I had to delete their partition tables and reload from scratch.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... I suspect that dissolving the cards with nitric acid probably won't help his efforts to get help from Kingston.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Several years ago, I bought a used 2-gig U3 Cruzer Micro from a friend. The software annoyed me, so I Googled it and removed it. It required a download from Sandisk, but was a very trouble-free process.
Not too long after, I filled that one up. I bought an 8-gig version of the same thing (I like the form factor). Removing/disabling U3 on that one was dead simple: It was in the menu built into the system.
I like these drives just fine. I carry one everywhere, hanging on my keyring off of a belt loop. It gets thrown, stepped on, washed, dried, and abused on a regular basis, and never fails.
But anyway, your annoyances, in your order:
a) So what? That's the market. Would it really displease you less if it were some gee-whiz multiplatform thing that worked on every device with a USB port, or would you then just complain about the fact that it's too expensive and consumes too much space? Or perhaps you'd prefer that hardware companies stop adding features to their devices to differentiate them from their competition?
b) So, fix it. You're bold enough to concoct legitimate complaints about technical things, but too big of a sissy to be bothered with rearranging drive letters? (Personally, I think the larger abomination here is that anyone is still using drive letters at all...)
c) It does not install anything; Windows does. U3 devices just appear to the OS as a USB hub. Connected to that hub, is a CD-ROM drive and some flash storage. After that, Windows sees this pile of newly-connected hardware and just tries to load drivers for it, just as it would with anything else USB or other hot-pluggable bus. In the case of U3, it succeeds, since Windows already has drivers for these sorts of devices built-in out-of-the-box. (An Ubuntu machine will undergo similar gyrations when presented with a U3 device; it's just quieter about the loading process.) And all of this is for one reason: To allow it to autorun on Windows XP, not to unleash some sort of bizarre and new evil unto the world.
Kid-proof tablet..
It looks like Kensington is dumping their defective parts on the S. American street vendor markets. I took a month long trip through south america this last december/january, and the one thing street vendors were hawking were 4 and 8gb kensington USB thumb drives for between $3 and 4 USD (converted from the local currency. I saw these for sale in Bogota, Colombia, Lima and Cusco, Peru as well as Rio de Janerio Brazil and in every tourist town in Uruguay. I ran into some swedish girls who were having trouble transfering their pictures from their camera to their kensington memory stick (of course I offered to help them). Lo and Behold, they had a Kensington brand thumb drive that couldn't be recognized in either Windows or Linux, bought in La Paz, Bolivia, and another in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.
You could claim they didn't dispose of their defective products properly, but clearly someone had the foresight to ship at least two shipping containers worth of these things to South America. No idea about the distribution network, but it must be huge and well run. They were clearly new, still in the plastic packaging, and the LED would light up and blink when plugged in, then stay lit. With a flip around protective cover.
moox. for a new generation.
I've seen this for years on their DRAM. But where I work is very specific saying they want Kingston modules on the RAM they purchase. I remember about 5 years ago getting Elixir memory from Kingston where they simply ripped off Elixir's sticker and put the Kingston sticker over it. We had received literally the same RAM minus Kingston's sticker from Elixir. It was literally the same RAM, PCB and all, with their sticker on it.
His answer was that, if I didn't like it, I shouldn't have taken it out of its box in the first place and plenty of people like it so why don't I just shut the hell up?
Charmers.
Your mistake was calling their UK support line. You're lucky they didn't insult your parentage too.
Putting moderation advice in your
Sorry you're wrong, at least on my Cruzer. The U3 part appears as a separate CD drive.
In TFA, he describes viewing the device's serial number by using Linux's /sys directory. Does anyone have details on how to do that? I've viewed the USB adapter's info by using lsusb -vs : but don't know how to view the actual microSD device.
those of us, and I'm showing my age, who've been around for a long time may remember how Sinclair Electronics started up? Basically he'd buy up batches of transistors (remember them?) which had failed batch testing, and retest individual ones so he could keep those which worked sufficiently well. That gave him a better margin on his electronic kits, but also caused him problems when components would fail prematurely.
or at least that's the legend around here in Cambridge.
That's the point! It looks like a CD drive, so the OS treats it like one, so you can autorun something on older machines(virus, antivirus, OS install discs). But you can make it go away and get a couple megs of storage back very easily. It isn't a seperate chunk of silicon, just a little trickery.
get the U3 uninstaller from their site.
It will re-format the disk and permanently remove the face cd-rom drive.
Or you can do what I did and hack it to change people's desktop when they "borrow" your key and plug it into their machine (since windows sees it as a cd-rom it will execute the autorun, unlike on a USB device.)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
It's also easy to remove with any modern partition editor. I've gotten a couple of drives second-hand with proprietary software "built-in". Open in GParted, delete all partitions, create one partition spanning entire drive. Fin.
A: The work fine in every OS I've ever tried them with
Try booting off of it with that crap still there. The drives are sold in a defective state and need to be repaired to be used to full potential.
D: The U3 feature can easily be turned off so the drive looks like any other cheaper flash drives.
the official tool only runs on real windows. wine fails. In virtuslbox with USB pasathrough, the tool crashes. I guess installing windows just to remove U3 isn't exactly difficult, but it is a colossal waste of time.
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
Heh. I have one plugged in my car stereo.
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.
Not only can it be turned off on any given Windows computer, but the uninstall process allows removal of the "hidden" partition from the drive itself (with the option of saving any other data on the drive).
you sir need to RTFM before tou bitch about how bad something is you have no business commenting on.
While I feel it's a bit swarmy to require opt-out from the U3 software, the fact that such an option exists is nice.
I've run into this as well with Dell 740 computers with built in (4 in 1) card readers. Our network drive letters start with J: and they sometimes cause problems when they stick a couple sandisk usb drives in.
I was thinking the same thing.
I can't say I've had NONE fail, but the only piece I remember failing was an oddball Toshiba laptop memory card that they happily replaced years after the fact for free. That replacement worked just fine until the laptop was replaced.
More recently I've been buying Kingston USB drives and SDHC cards because they seemed to have the best balance of reviews on Newegg, so obviously not everyone there has had problems. So far all devices have been working just fine.
Now watch, I've probably jinxed myself - I have two Kingston 16GB SDHC cards arriving *today* for my Sheeva Plugs. They'll probably both die fiery deaths, taking the rest of the kit along with them! ;)
>> You are a moron:
At least I'm not a rude asshole...
oh wait...
Yep I had several Amigas.
>> It was an awesome idea back then.
Sorry, but even back then I thought it was a crappy idea because of its potential for abuse.
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..
So, for all those folks getting upity about what is essentially a common business practice (reselling products to relablers on the spot market which possibly include reselling factory seconds), what do you think should be done with excess inventory, and/or functional, but not perfect products?
1. Bury them in a land-fill
2. Spend even more energy, money, and resources to recycle the raw materials and build yet another widget.
3. Sell them to relabelers to salvage the manufacturing value
Seems to me that #3 is the way to go to me. It recovers the most value from the resources that the manufacturing process consumed and thus probably is the best economical and environmental choice. Sure the products may or may not be of the best quality, but then again, you probably didn't pay a premium for them either.
In a non-utopian society, there are multiple value points that address the needs of consumers. Not every one needs "perfect" and not everyone can afford "perfect", but just because it's isn't perfect, it don't mean that a product can't meet someone's needs at that price point. Just the other day, I was shopping in an outlet store for a large department store where they resell returned and/or slighly damaged merchandise at over a 50% discount. As an example, they had a $6000 bedset for $895, but no returns were allowed. Okay, so maybe I can afford the $6000 bed, but maybe it's really only worth $895 to me. But for someone else, maybe they have $200 to spend and they get a bed that normally was priced at $800. As long as we know what we're buying, seems like this is a win-win for both parties.
It doesn't seem either economical or environmental to just scrap it if it isn't perfect to avoid offending anyone sensibilities? Basically this is not that different than craigslist at a corporate level. Instead of the initial customer deciding that it doesn't have economic value anymore to keep/use, the company is just deciding it doesn't have economic value to keep and/or sell through normal sales channels.
I guess these same folks just want us to cut down more trees and making more plastic parts dig up and burn more coal and fill more landfills. I suppose we could do that too, but some folks seem to be on both sides of the fence here and there's some congnitive disconnect going on with these lines of thinking. Maybe those folks just irrationally hate corporations and use any excuse to feed this cognitive disconnect between economic efficiency and environmental efficiency...
Mod parent up, shit always ends up in South America.
In the latest U3 drives it's actually a separate thing controlled by SCSI commands.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Quality control is very important to anyone who wants repeat business. Any modern 300mm flash fab worth's is silicon will perform at least the following tests.
1. Wafer level tests inline between mask steps
2. Wafer level tests after completed processing. Chips are usually either changed into MLC or SLC at this step. If any repairs are needed they are completed here (by using built in redundancy).
3. Select wafers are sent on for additional testing to verify cycling and to monitor for mean time between failure shifts.
4. After die are cut and packaged repeat tests above to ensure the packaging process didn't jack up the wafer.
The worst case scenario in all of this is to have a customer begin to complain about issues w/ your chips. That means your probe scheme either didn't catch the issue or the issue matters now because of another issue and their combined result means death.
After you have identified the issue then its long road to find that at your first implant level was jacked because a tech ignored a tool error on a batch of 125 wafers and sent them on w/o any documentation.
Booting off a flash drive? As if the average consumer is EVER going to want to do that? And if they do, they can boot up J Random Linux LiveCD and just plow over the device with *parted.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
How dare you complain about a feature you couldn't have know about before you used the product! You should have done extensive online research first!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I've run into this as well with Dell 740 computers with built in (4 in 1) card readers. Our network drive letters start with J: and they sometimes cause problems when they stick a couple sandisk usb drives in.
Windows, LOL.