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."

Comments

All that from a few open chips, eh?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That's a lot of conjecture based on only two pieces of evidence. That'll never put OJ away, Marcia.

Re:All that from a few open chips, eh?

[Tetsujin]

Only one place in Gotham City produces these kinds of chips!

Re:All that from a few open chips, eh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is, arguably, additionally significant that the Kingston reps went from "Nope, we're not taking them back, you already programmed them, your problem..." to "Oh, goodness no, they definitely aren't fakes; but, um, yeah, we'll replace them for you..." when Bunnie presented his results.

Bunnie definitely knows his stuff hardware wise and(having been Chumby's man-on-the-ground for outsourced Chinese production for a while now) probably knows a thing or two about the dark corners of the supply chain; but his sample size is kind of small, and he could certainly be wrong in this case.

The fact that the vendor folded like a cheap card table when he presented his conclusion, though, makes me rather more inclined to trust it.

(Incidentally, isn't it kind of amazing that slapping a full 32-bit ARM core, with flash controller firmware, onto a flash chip is as cheap as simply testing the flash chip? Having been born early enough to see the tail end of the days when an 8086 box was a several-thousand-substantially-less-inflated-dollars device, that kind of blows my mind.)

Re:All that from a few open chips, eh?

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Yawn

[duncanFrance]

"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.

Re:Yawn

[drachenstern]

Wait, you mean that "ValueRAM" doesn't give the concept of their brands away? I use Kingston stuff because it's bulk and cheap, not because it's performance. Anyone else who does otherwise is amazing me with their concepts of brand recognition.

Re:Yawn

[Sique]

They never have been. That's why they are called "brands" and not "manufacturers".

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You're under the impression that the other RAM or flash drives you buy are not rebranded? There are very few companies in the world that make DRAM in quantity: samsung, hynix, toshiba, and elpida. Similarly for NAND flash, it is only made by samsung, hynix, toshiba-sandisk, and intel-micron. Unless you're buying one of these directly, you are purchasing rebranded products.

Re:Yawn

[atrus]

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).

Re:Yawn

[lobsterturd]

Why is this modded 5 insightful? I can't believe how Slashdotters' comprehension skills seem to be lacking.

The point of the FA is not that Kingston doesn't make their own parts (that applies to every vendor), but that their authorized distributor delivered an irregular batch of cards that seemingly couldn't even handle being programmed with a ~50 MB firmware. These irregular cards just so happened to use the same controller chip as an obvious fake, which raised the question of how a seemingly reputable brand managed to unexpectedly supply such low-quality parts.

Obligatory XKCD

[bennomatic]

http://xkcd.com/691/

Nothing New Here - It's Common

[loose electron]

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.

Re:This just in

[bennomatic]

Oh, come on; if you had just used nitric acid for any purpose at all, wouldn't you want to tell the world? That's SO COOOOOOL!

NAND is getting worse and worse

[YesIAmAScript]

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!

Kingston , at least sells SLC-based Flash devices

[blind biker]

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.

Re:This just in

[sunking2]

Yup. real hard: http://www.appliance411.com/purchase/sears.shtml

Re:Sandisk suck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sandisk suck

[compro01]

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

Re:This just in

[gad_zuki!]

>Your Kenmore dishwasher is really a Whirlpool and Kirkland jeans are Wranglers.

It doesnt stop there!

Your wife is really a man named Todd in drag.
Your Saturn coupe is really a Buick sedan with a slick paintjob.
Your artificial heart is really a 1974 pool pump.
Your premium dog food is just low quality Senior Chow.
Your apple pie is really "Industrial Apple Taste #64" with some HFCS.
Your idea of love is really some hormones and neurons going off.
Your college is really just an expensive adult daycare.
Your grandpa was really a drifter named "Smitty" who killed your real grandpa.

Sorry to hear about your grandpa.

I am not a warranty expert, but...

[damn_registrars]

... I suspect that dissolving the cards with nitric acid probably won't help his efforts to get help from Kingston.

Re:Sandisk suck

[adolf]

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.