That little memory chip serving tunes to your smartphone, the one that's just a sneeze or twitch away from going where the socks go whenever you take it out, has a far more interesting history than you think. Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, co-creator of the
Chumby, explored the surprisingly interesting underside of microSD production in China after being given a batch of questionable memory cards direct from Kingston itself. Huang's conclusion is that the chips were created during a "ghost shift," when a rogue employee runs the manufacturing lines after hours to produce authentic
looking but decidedly sub-par memory chips using materials of inadequate quality. Huang bought numerous questionable examples on the gray market and watched as vendors took bogus cards and threw them into authentic retail packaging, complete with serial numbers and holograms. If you're as fascinated by the world of
KIRF as we are, it's a very interesting read.
posted February 24th 2010 11:07AM
Oh, the wonders of a society where intellectual property rights is just a joke.
Oh, the wonders of a society where intellectual property rights are just a joke.
danget, sorry. Stupid comment lag.
@paul34
And obviously you couldn't wait and see if it was going to come up for a minute or two... wouldn't want to miss that first slot, would we? :p
"Hot off the market, it's KIRFKards!"
"How much memory does it hold?"
"2 Gigs"
"Wow--"
"Assuming both of your gigs aren't more than an hour long"
"Wait wha-"
*grabs money and runs*
......Story of my life.
Bunnie's also the guy who first hacked the original Xbox (and wrote a book about it). Very clever dude.
Bought "dodgy" memory sticks for my PSP in Dubai. Still going unlike the expensive Sony Cr*p. Sub par or sub price?
@thegasman2000 Yeah, illegal copies are a real mixed bag. I got a 16GB SDHC card on eBay for $11...I assumed it was something like this. It died after only a few months. I also got a Class 6 32GB card for $16. It's been fine for about a year of moderate use.
@thegasman2000
In a past life I was involved in importing shoes from Korea.
The factories that produced all the branded shoes all had 'ghost shifts' too with the factory managers producing an excess to sell on the side. In terms of quality, the products themselves are genuine -- obvious given that its from the same factory made with the same materials. The only difference was that the 'ghost shifts' wouldn't be so strict with quality assurance so you had the odd reject here and there.
I got a Kingston MicroSD card from buy.com once. The thing would start off with data transfers at 6MB/s, and slowly dip to nothing in a few seconds. Thankfully, Kingston RMAd it without trouble. But really, how does one screw up this kind of item. Now I know.
I bought an '8 GB' card in Shenzhen, China a couple of years ago. Turned out to be a 256 MB card with 8GB labeling! They even showed me how it 'worked' by plugging it in to a laptop (where it read 8GB), but once you tried to format it, it formatted for 256MB only...doh!
@serenity1
Moral: don't buy things in China?
@whiskers. It's a bit hard not to, every thing comes from China
@technobrakes Not that hard to do, Everything made in China outside of China isn't bought in China( by the consumer).
Ghost in the Shift, Memory Card Complex!
I wonder if this is where Microcenter gets its dirt cheap flash mem. Its a private label brand, but I'm sure like most things it just batch produced and they slap their logo on it.
@KAL326
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those 8GB-mircoSDs
@Teer1998, KAL326
Its nice to see we have some GiTS:SAC fans in the audience.
P.S. It was those damn Tachikomas....
@SolidSnake Actually there's an equally good chance he's a Catcher in the Rye fan!
@TimStevens Nope, Its definitely GiTS: SAC Little Laughing Man reference :)
@Teer1998 I can dig it.
http://i26.tinypic.com/14e319s.jpg
i knew it.
that is all
Time to test that cheap mini-SD I got from DealExtreme. Never really needed it up til now (I just bought it as a spare), but this article makes me fear that I've been ripped off.
I already thought it was strange that the mini-SD card itself was in a plastic package, but the normal-sized adapterwas taped to the package.
Hmmmm... :)
"after hours"?
Hard to imagine those facilities have much downtime
Not too surprising. I work in a university network department and we get counterfeit cisco SFP modules all the time. They function just as well (so it seems) but are sub-par in build quality and usually fail pretty quickly.
It seems like most KIRF comes from sketch Asian countries...
When I was in China my girlfriend bought a SanDisk-branded 2GB USB flash drive that seemed to work fine at first, but could actually only hold a few megs of data before corrupting everything. I'll bet it was the same kind of thing.
@Alex It's exactly the same. It's also the scam they are pulling off on ebay that the authorities are trying their hardest to crack down on. There's so many rebranded memory cards floating around (anywhere from big names like kingston, to your local drugstore having their own memory cards) that it makes it hard to tell who is legit and who is not. Buying stuff off the street in China is always sketchy, but it's hard to trust even your local computer shop now.
@swmc
Damn that's so sketchy.
I had the same thoughts about eBay. I almost just bought a 16GB microSD on eBay, that seemed legit since it was priced only slightly below Amazon, but I figured maybe that was their strategy. So I just ended up ordering it on Amazon.
This might explain why my first 2 GB pen drive failed misteriously shortly after purchase without abuse, while many other have survived the wash cycle...
When I was in China last year I was shopping at a technology market. There were SD cards and flash drives that supposedly held 9999 gigabytes. The cards and drives had obviously been tampered with such that when you plugged them into a computer they read as having 9999 gigs.
@CitrixLemon Yeah, I bought a memory card the other day that read "All of the Gigabytes", I put all my files into it, they seemed to fit, but now I can't find them again...
I bought a 16GB Sandisk MicroSD card on eBay that was sold to me as a 32GB microSD.
My bad for not checking the manufacturers website to make sure they were actually available yet.
However, I feel that some of the fault lies with the manufacturers for announcing a product and then not have it available yet for more than a f-ing year after they announce it.
In my case, I did a quick search, saw they announced it over a year ago (or so) and bought one.
I did manage to get my money back through PayPal.
How do the cards turn low quality just because they ran the machine after hours?
@NizP
because they used waste material, thats why
@NizP
Lot of times the workers will substitute materials, like using baking soda instead of germanium, or used pizza boxes instead of silicon.
@galius The mystery ghost supervisor is Delia Smith?
China has a ghost shift? And presumably a version of Torchwood as well? Oh well, at least the Cybermen will get them first before deleting the rest of the world.
This has been a long running problem with SanDisk SD Cards as well... surprised that this is the first time I've seen it mentioned here. Ebay and Amazon dealers a like hock their 'grey market' SD/HC cards for fractions of the cost of new ones... they're virtually identical looking until you benchmark them with a flash-memory throughput program.
It's disappointing when you have a load of irreplaceable pictures and your 'genuine' card fails!
Where are the 32GB MicroSDs?
Read the book "Poorly Made in China" to see how it is a virtue with some manufacturers to nickel and dime their customers by deliberately reducing quality until they complain and then charge them more to maybe restore the quality. Keep that in mind when you see a low price, its you that is taking the risk of finding out exactly what the quality will be like (not that price and quality always go hand in hand). One of things not mentioned is that rarely are all of the chips coming off a wafer all tested. Pick one or two and see if they work OK is the usual procedure.