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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.
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
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.
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.
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
"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?
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 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.
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.
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
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..