Quality Concerns For Kingston microSD Cards 149
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."
All that from a few open chips, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Only one place in Gotham City produces these kinds of chips!
Re:All that from a few open chips, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I'm pretty sure the cost he was considering is purely hardware... especially given the context of the rest of the comment.
Read before reply, please.
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Far from two pieces of evidence...
a) A full lot (1K+) of identified bad SD cards
b) A detailed forensic examination of 6 cards, including known genuine cards as well as known-fraudulent cards.
c) That Kingston folded like a cheap suit BEFORE this blog posting.
Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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I agree with this sentiment. Brands haven't had a 1:1 relationship between their manufacturing facilities for a long time. This seems especially true with the industry in question.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
They never have been. That's why they are called "brands" and not "manufacturers".
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Its probably a surprise to a lot of people who dont investigate brands or dont understand why Kingston flash fails more often than other flash. Every so often we need to be reminded that "you get what you pay for" still works. 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.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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I usually avoid them because I know they dont make their own stuff
That's ostensibly an advantage. Every fab turns out some turkeys and bad lots. If Kingston has good QA they can find and re-sell the best and reject the rest. If.
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I think its significant because it might actually help consumers make a better choice. In this case if I'm looking at a Kingston SD card and a SanDisk and the Kingston is cheaper, I'll probably buy it knowing its got SanDisk guts in it. It could go the other way, knowing that SanDisk gets A+ parts while Kingston is A-. But knowing that difference is important before dropping coin on something expensive.
SD cards are a cheap commodity, but there are more expensive anecdotal examples like LCD panels. There are
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I know that in photography it's becoming common knowledge that Kingston cards don't work and SanDisk ones do at the higher speeds. Some of the new Canon cameras that can record HD video and take 3+ RAW photos a second need fast memory, and many Canon sites will warn you away from Kingston. Thus, I think the A+ vs A- is more like A+ versus D- ... it's not QUITE a failing grade but not worth the reduction in price.
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Re:Yawn (Score:4, Informative)
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SD classes are the minimum write speed, but are only guaranteed on a freshly formatted card, and the max speed is all over the place.
Lower class cards can potentially be faster than higher class cards, depending on the manufacturers and usage of the card.
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I always thought those class restrictions were too slow. 6MB/sec, really? It should be advertised as 6+MB - or, they could create "grades" above 6MB, since that's a pretty slow speed anymore for moving data around.
I just saw a review somewhere on a micro SDHC card that had a transfer rate of close to 15MB/s. Still labelled "class 6" but obviously head of the class. How's a consumer to know that the card is faster than 6?
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The class definition is the lowest speed. The 15MB/s may be a max speed rating. Case in point, San Disk's Ultra SDHC card [sandisk.com]. A card marked 15MB/s, yet is only a class 4 card. That means max speed is 15MB/s, but in some cases, it'll drop below 6MB/s. In fact, that 15MB/s is a read speed, it cannot write to the card that fast.
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FWIW, Transcend class 6 16GB cards work great in both my Canon 500D (T1i) at raw burst and full video, and also in my Canon HF100 HD camcorder at full bitrate. Have bought 5 now.
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Well, I have an HFS-100 hd camcorder, and I use a Kingston class 4 SDHC card in it just fine. I'm not sure if 3+ RAW photos a second is more than 24 Mbps, but if not, I'd say you should be good. Maybe I just got lucky, but if even a class 4 card is ok I'd bet that a class 6 would work for something a bit faster.
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the other thing to remember is that while this batch had Sandisk parts, another batch with the same product markings might have some other brand, and it might be a better or worse brand as long as it meets the Kingston supplier specs. ValueRAM indeed.
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There are only a few fabs in the world, so anything from a Westinghouse store brand to a Bang and Oluffsen uber-TV will have very similar panels.
Um no. your example comparing Westinghouse to B&O may be accurate as B&O is garbage when it comes to video and their audio stuff is falling out of favor as well, this is NOT the case with know high end lines.
Pioneer Elite plasmas or LCD's are very different from a el-cheapo brand. I've been inside a bunch of different brands and types and yes there are s
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Indeed. That has been known for as long as Kingston exists.
They used to have good quality control, though. Apparently not any longer.
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And what's the problem anyway? I've always liked Sandisk media.
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The message I get from this is never, ever, to buy Kingston products.
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Indeed. The only problem with it is that you sometimes get different products with the same ID. I remember c't (German computer magazine) berating them for doing this with RAM sticks back in the 90's. At least RAM sticks and memory cards don't need drivers...
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I ran into this problem before with Kingston RAM, where different chips were used, but it was otherwise the same part number.
I had a bunch of identical systems, all using "identical" ram. However, a couple were having issues, and totally failed memtest. So I sent them back, and got new ones - and these too failed. I took them back again, and they checked them in the store, where they worked fine. Upon further inspection, all the ones that failed had one brand of chip, while the working ones had a different
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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 bran
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Sony did used to make DVD drives at one point.
They merged their optical drive business with NEC's and created Optiarc.
Actually, looks like Sony bought out NEC's share, so Optiarc is all Sony's now. So they are back to making optical drives again. ^_^
rtfm? (Score:1, Insightful)
why is this news?
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You have the exact same number of facts backing up your beliefs as religious people do, yet that doesn't stop you from preaching your view as being the only true view.
I think that's rather the point. There are no religious people in the world, just different kinds of atheists. Some people disbelieve all religions, some people disbelieve all except one (which, given the number of religions in the world, is a statistically insignificant difference). For some reason, the people who disbelieve all except one seem to think that this is a more sensible choice.
This just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
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It's cooler to use nitric to add nitrogen groups to carbon chains!
I suppose it's actually hotter now that I think about it...
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Actually, the new kenmore's are made by LG ;)
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Well actually I didn't know that Maytag ~ Sears until lately. Would have been nice, but since I didn't make the original purchase, I think that can slide too.
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Went looking for the information that that you assume everyone knows.
I guess that since everyone does know that may explain why you can't find a list of who makes generic versions of what.
You may find it for specific items like the ones you listed, and you usually learn this while in the store comparing different models and different brands. Outside of the store that information is hard to come by.
Re:This just in (Score:4, Informative)
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Nice resource for appliances. Thanks.
Re:This just in (Score:5, Funny)
>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.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
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TFA already included that very XKCD. Its cultural embrace extends...
Nothing New Here - It's Common (Score:5, Informative)
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.
NAND is getting worse and worse (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Yeah, I would've expected far better from Bunnie too. Anyone who would be even remotely surprised by this "discovery" simply has no clue about the way the electronics industry works.
Chances are that Kingston isn't buying "SanDisk A-" parts - they're just buying the same flash chip that SanDisk and everyone else buys from Toshiba. Maybe SanDisk had some involvement in the design process with Toshiba, but to see this and assume Kingston is getting the "A-" parts or factory rejects is just plain stupid.
He ju
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you can expect to start to see real problems soon,
Soon? I've had so many Kingston thumb drives fail, I've stopped buying the brand. I have an NSLU2 hiding in a closet running on a thumb drive that's been running for years. It ate a Kingston thumb drive in a matter of weeks...
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Most people turn off swap on Flash drives.
Slashdotted (Score:1, Offtopic)
Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: Permission denied in Unknown on line 0
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
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Maybe he reverse engineered it. Bunny would be proud.
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Security through Obscurity never worked.
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It's fine to use PHP and MySQL for Internet-facing applications but it's not fine to try that without caching. Hint: cache the page. If you really get heavy load, create a static HTML cache of it. The language and database have nothing to do with it, design has everything to do with it.
Kingston , at least sells SLC-based Flash devices (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
My SD card suddenly accelerated... (Score:1)
as a IT buyer (Score:2)
Kingston never made memory (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Muskin
Mushkin is shit.
Corsair is shit.
OCZ is shit.
Your favorite brand is shit.
etc.
"Is that memory shit?" flowchart:
Does it have a rebate?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
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Does it have a 1337 heat spreader, cooling fans, or LEDs?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
|
Do the specs indicate non-standard voltages?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
|
It may be okay.
The open "secret" in the (system) memory world is that the expensive RAM is the defective RAM. If a batch is slightly defective, crank up the voltages, add a sharp looking heat spreader, sell it as super awesome f
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Mushkin DDR2 didn't work with my last two motherboards. I ended up trying OCZ XTC Platinum Rev2, Crucial Ballistix, and Kingston ValueRAM. Those three worked fine in both. Right now I'm using Corsair XMS.
@Sexconker: This Corsair stuff is only rated at 1.8v. Heatspreaders spread heat, which helps if one chip is slightly weaker than the others. You also have to factor in that every single memory operation won't be spread between all 8 chips on a DIMM. It might even be possible to have a relatively high throug
Extremely common (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Kingston has never made their own chips. Ever.
They've always been a packager and a PCB maker -- a middleman to assemble the parts and sell them.
It's a perfectly valid thing to be doing, and a useful one: I can get Kingston-packaged RAM for just about bloody anything.
This is just a nasty hit piece (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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Not having a fab does not necessarily mean you are re-badging though. In the memory market this may be largely true, but the fabs still have the potential to create designs from third party masks much like with ASICs.
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I'm not sure why a company would hire another's fab for making memory. Memory margins are usually slim and require massive economies of scale. I can see controllers being custom made, but again, that'd be rare for something as cheap as flash memory.
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I never said it was practical, or made economic sense, but it certainly is possible in theory. Perhaps in the event of an application needing memory with a different set of tradeoffs than is standard.
I could almost imagine specialty flash memory for say filming, where you would be writing into pre-erased cells, and are willing to have an absurd block size (perhaps even the whole core is one block) since the flow would be write one, potentially ready many, and then erase all. Perhaps not a great example sinc
Sad (Score:2)
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 ha
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I wouldn't be surprised if the very people that have the gumption to fight and claw their way to CEOhood are exactly the kind of people that have no qualms about damning an entire country to failure just to get a few measly bucks and retire. While it should be written into contract, no CEO in their right mind would accept a contract that asked them to take personal responsibility for what is happening to the company. In fact, the more padded they are from the losses of the company, the more likely they ar
Um, (Score:2)
"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.
I am not a warranty expert, but... (Score:4, Funny)
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Kingston dumping defective unitsS. America market (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
sinclair electronics (Score:2)
or at least that's the legend around here in Cambridge.
save the environment (or the economy or something) (Score:2)
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 t
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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.
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"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.
Re:Sandisk suck (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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>> You are a moron:
At least I'm not a rude asshole...
oh wait...
Re:Sandisk suck (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing you are referring to is the "U3 [wikipedia.org]" 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 [sandisk.com]
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Re:Sandisk suck (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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 [wikipedia.org] to turn this function off. GParted does not include such magic [fedoraforum.org].
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Its not ROM just a partition; if you don't like just go into computer management and remove it.
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Sorry you're wrong, at least on my Cruzer. The U3 part appears as a separate CD drive.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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