Micro SD

wolfric

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
A very entertaining if some what long read. A quick summary would be in the lines of a vendor buying a batch of kingston cards and realizing that they were fakes. He investigates and buys a varity of microSD cards and analyses them and strips them using nitric acid to see what's actually inside. He finds that by comparing the kingston microsd cards that many fake kingston cards are entering the market but also that the kingston core is just another brand card.

Significantly, Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people’s chips in its own packaging URL="http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918#comment-512017"]clarification[/URL. 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. Oddly enough, of all the vendors, Kingston quoted with the best lead times and pricing — better than SanDisk or Samsung, despite the competition making all their own silicon and thereby having a lower inherent cost structure. 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.

Note that reselling other peoples products isn't inherently bad as many brands do it. Keeping up with margin can be troublesome which sees us many fakes being streamed into the market. A really informative read and fair ****s to him for the amount of research he did.


Picture of micro sd compares

Biggins

Heck of a detailed report. He went to a lot of hassle for it.
There's a series of lessons to be learned here and I'm sure Kingston won't be too impressed by that report.

I suspect that they will have to respond to it sometime soon.