In the link I posted above VW explain there are seven license's built into the card, one is used loading the maps leaving six for updates. As the updated maps are released every six months you will get three years.As others have pointed out that is probably the usual VAG horse manure. If the system were licence bound then you could update only once a year and so get 6 free years. The system is time bound - and is marketed as such in all Skoda marketing materials.
The point is that I dont think simple counts work. I am of the opinion that the head unit actually has to write some information to the card following certain events (such as detection of a data update). Why this matters to me is that my SD card was bricked following my very first map update. Skoda insist this was due to me doing something wrong on my PC and that could be the only feasible explanation.
I was therefore faced with a £230 bill to replace the card after only owning the car for a few months. But if there are read/write operations being performed on the secure area of the card by the head unit it is equally feasible that the Amundsen unit bricked the card. Hence my interest in understanding how this works. It will probably never happen again but you never know.
Edited 20 July, 2014 by Minimoke. The DRM scheme embedded in the SD cards is the Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM or CPPM) specification of the 4C Entity, which features the Cryptomeria cipher (also termed C2). The specification is kept secret and is accessible only to licensees. The scheme has not been broken or cracked; however, this feature of SD cards is rarely used to protect content. DVD-Audio uses the same DRM scheme.
Google 4C Entity or VAG use 4C Entity.' .this feature of SD cards is rarely used to protect content.'
So if it is not protecting the content what is it protecting? I did Google as you suggested and found several comments on Reddit. Some of them are just plain wrong - such as: ' From the manual presumably the VW manual? :For licensing reasons, once the copying has been completed, the memory card will be permanently assigned to this radio navigation system and CANNOT be used in other radio navigation systms of the same type any more'. I have genuine Skoda SD cards which I can freely interchange between different head units. Keithvrs and a work colleage also performed a similar experiment about a week ago and proved you can freely swap cards between head units without let or hinderance. I'm may be making heavy weather of this - perhaps I'm an 'early adopter'.
But when a few more Skoda custoners start being forced to pay £230 to fix a SD card fault which prevents the Nav from working caused by a potentially dodgy firmware event in the head unit then the topic may shoot up the priority list. I hope that an understanding of how this all works will help deal with Skoda in an informed manner concerning Nav/SD card problems in future. At the moment customers are totally at the mercy of whatever Skoda customer service say. Edited 20 July, 2014 by Minimoke. '.this feature of SD cards is rarely used to protect content.' So if it is not protecting the content what is it protecting?
Trust me I'm no expert on this, only posted as I hoped it would help others more knowledgeable than myself. I read it as it was rarely used to protect the content that users read/write, illegal downloads etc, but could be used to protect the section that is encrypted. When I searched I came up with, licensed users can access and dedicated hardware. As you say there is loads of about it out there and like anything you look up on the web most of it is cr.p (excluding this site of course) I'm not planning to keep my car more than three years, but if I mess up an update. I read it as it was rarely used to protect the content that users read/write, illegal downloads etc, but could be used to protect the section that is encrypted.
When I searched I came up with, licensed users can access and dedicated hardware. As you say there is loads of about it out there and like anything you look up on the web most of it is cr.p (excluding this site of course) I'm not planning to keep my car more than three years, but if I mess up an update. You may have made a good point about protection of the reserved area on the card. I hadn't thought of that. Your comment about possible issues with map updates is pertinent as this was exactly the position I started from! Hi folks, First post - please be gentle! Trying to update the Maps in my 66-plate Octavia.
The SD card in the Nav unit (Amundsen 2) is version 5L0 051 236L / ECE1 2016/17 (KT 22 / 2016). When I go to the update portal and enter my VIN, it says 'No updates for VIN'.
Went to local Skoda dealer and they tried & got the same result. They were puzzled. The dealer also tried the VIN numbers for a 16-plate and a 67-plate octavia and got the same result. Is the update portal down or having problems? I have sees a couple of Skoda SD cards on ebay - one labelled 5L0 051 236AD (KT 45 / 2017) and the other 236T (KT 22 / 2017).
Would they be compatible & just slot straight in to update the maps? Do they have to be registered in any way? They say they are compativble with the Amundsen 2 MIB. I took three different VIN numbers of Octavias with the same Sat Nav whist I was at the dealer and also tried those on the update site.
Two say the same as mine - i.e. 'No updates for VIN' whilst the third says 'Last update Nov 17, next Aug 18'. Is there a problem with the update site?? Cheers, Zaph.
I was quite impressed with the sound from my Octavia initially and for a standard car audio system it's not bad. However, it's summer time and time to crank it up. I read on a previous forum that replacing the door tweeter 6.2uF Capacitors with 2.2uF dramatically improved the top-end sound and eliminated a lot of sound distortion.
I'm planning on doing this and putting dynamat insulation behind the door speakers. I've seen the YouTube videos on door card removal and it looks pretty simple. However, I'm also wanting to upgrade the Door Speakers Front and Rear. So I need some info: The existing speakers are simple 2 way.
I could go for 3 or even 4 way but with the car having component speakers (separate tweeters at the top of the doors) I figure it will be best to stick with 2 way (Decent Brand, RMS Power, Frequency Range, Appropriate Size and Impedance). Also, I was considering buying component speakers and completely renewing the tweeters as well (I would prefer to do this supposed to simply changing the capacitors on the existing tweeters in order to ensure frequency matching with aftermarket door speaker). However, I read somewhere that the standard tweeters are glued in place and are not to be removed. Plus there are other considerations: What physical size are the standard speakers? Regards the Amundsen Audio Output: What is the rms power output? What is the impedance? What is the frequency range?
Any help or advice would be most appreciated. Best Regards, Jnr. Octavia Mk3 with Amundsen satnav.
I have two phones - a Windows 10 from work and a personal Android running pure Oreo with Android contacts app. Both phones have trouble navigating to a contact's address and I'm getting fed up of 'This contact has no address that can be used for navigation'. I can usually manage to get the Win10 phone by ensuring the street address is in correct field and putting the city in both the City and State fields on my phone. The Android is useless as it doesn't parse the address into separate fields, it's all dumped in a single line. As it's company car the Android Auto update isn't a goer - anyone have any better success?. Amundsen SD card part number. BRISKODA is owned and operated by Summit 360 Ltd, registered in England & Wales, company number 05710517.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner, registration number ZA187892, it details the purpose for which we process personal data. Disclaimer: BRISKODA is not an official SKODA site and is not affiliated to SKODA in any way.
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The ware for was not an incidental post. It is actually snapshot of a much longer forensic investigation to find the ground truth behind some irregular memory cards. It all started back in December of 2009, when was in the midst of production for the chumby One. A call came in from the floor noting that SMT yield had dropped dramatically on one lot, so I drove over to the building to have a look (this is the advantage of being in China during production — you can fix problems like this within the hour, before they become really serious issues).
After poking and prodding a bit, I realized that all the units failing had Kingston microSD cards from a particular lot code. I had the factory pull the entire lot of microSD cards from the line and rework all the units that had these cards loaded.
Sure enough, after subtracting these cards from the line, yield was back to normal again. Normally, the story would end there; you’d RMA the material, get an exchange for the lot, and move on.
Except there were a couple of problems. First, Kingston wouldn’t take the cards back because we had programmed them. Second, there was a lot of them — about a thousand all together, and chumby was already deeply back-ordered. Also, memory cards aren’t cheap; the spot price on this type of memory card is around $4-5, so it’s a few thousand dollars in scrap if we can’t get them exchanged and neither chumby nor the CM is large enough to sneeze at a few kilobucks. So I kicked into forensic mode.
The first thing that raised my suspicions is the external markings on the irregular Kingston cards. On the left is a sample of the irregular card. On the right is a sample of a normal card. I’ve put red arrows on the details that called the most attention to me at first.
The most blatantly strange issue is that the card on the left has its lot code silkscreened using the same stencil as the main logo. Silkscreening a lot code on isn’t that unusual, but typically the silk does not share the same stencil as the logo, so you’ll see some small variance in the coloration, font, or alignment of the lot code from the rest of the text. In fact, across the entire batch of irregular cards, they shared the exact same lot code (N0214-001.A00LF) (typically the lot code will vary every couple hundred cards at least). This is in contrast to the card on the right, which is laser-marked, and has a lot code that varied with every tray of 96 units. The second strange issue, perhaps more subtle and perhaps not damning, is the irregularity in the “D” of the microSD logo. Typically, brand name vendors like Kingston would be very picky about the accuracy of their logos. The broken D is something found on SanDisk cards, but Kingston cards found in US retail almost universally use a solid D.
Sd Card Recovery
It turns out the weirdness in the external markings is just the start of it. When we read out the electronic card ID data on the two cards (available through /sys entries in linux), this is what we found: First, the date code on the irregular card is uninitialized. Dates are counted as the offset from 00/2000 in the CID field, so a value of 00/2000 means they didn’t bother to assign a date (for what it’s worth, in the year 2000, 2GB microSD cards also didn’t exist).
Also, the serial number is very low — 0x960 is decimal 2,400. Other cards in the irregular batch also had similarly very low serial numbers, in the hundreds to thousands range. The chance of me “just happening” to get the very first microSD cards out of a factory is pretty remote. The serial number of the normal card, for example, is 0x9C62CAE6, or decimal 2,623,720,166 — a much more feasible serial number for a popular product like a microSD card.
Very low serial numbers, like very low MAC ID addresses, are a hallmark of the “ghost shift”, i.e. The shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books.
Significantly, ghost shifts are often run using marginal material that would normally be disposed of but were intercepted on the way to the grinder. As a result, the markings and characteristics of the material often look absolutely authentic, because the ghost material is a product of the same line as genuine material.
Furthermore, the manufacturer’s ID is 0x41 (ASCII ‘A’), which I don’t recognize (supposedly the SD group assigns all the MIDs but I don’t see a public list of them anywhere). The OEMID is also 0x3432, which is suspiciously ASCII ’42’ (one more than the hex value for the manufacturer ID). These hex/ascii confusions are possible signs that someone who didn’t appreciate the meaning of these fields was running a ghost shift making these cards. Armed with this evidence, we confronted Kingston — both the distributor in China as well as the US sales rep. First, we wanted to know if these were real cards, and second, if they were real cards, why were the serialization codes irregular? After some time, the Kingston guys came back to us and swore these cards were authentic, not fakes, but at least they reversed their position on not offering an exchange on the cards — they took back the programmed cards and exchanged them for new ones, no further questions asked.
However, they never answered as to why their card ID numbers were irregular. While I know chumby is a small fry customer compared to the Nokias of the world, I think it’s still important that they answer basic questions about their quality control process even to the small fry. I had an issue once with an old version of a part being accidentally shipped to me, and once I could prove the issue to them, I received world-class customer service from Quintic, a full explanation, and an immediate and full exchange of the parts at their cost. That was exemplary service, and I commend and strongly recommend Quintic for it.
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Kingston, on the other hand, did not set an example to follow. Normally, at this point, I would simply disqualify Kingston as a vendor, but I’m more persistent than that. It’s disconcerting that a high-profile, established brand would stand behind such irregular components. Who is to say SanDisk or Samsung wouldn’t do the same? Price erosion has been brutal on all the FLASH vendors, and as small fry I might be repeatedly taken advantage of as a sink for marginal material to improve the FLASH vendor’s bottom lines. Given the relatively high cost of these components, I needed to develop some simple guidelines for IQC (incoming quality control) inspection to accept or reject shipments from memory vendors, so I decided to do more digging to try and find ground truth.
The first thing I had to do was collect a lot of samples. The key is to attempt to collect both regular and irregular cards in the wild, so I went to the district and wandered around the gray markets there.
I bought about ten memory cards total from small vendors, at prices varying from 30-50 RMB ($4.40 – $7.30), most of them priced toward 30 RMB. The process of shopping for irregular cards itself was interesting. In talking to a couple dozen vendors, you learn a few things. First, Kingston as a brand is weak in China for microSD cards.
Sandisk has done a lot more marketing in the microSD space, and as a result, it’s much easier to find Sandisk cards on the open market. The quality of the grey-market Sandisk cards are also typically more consistent. Second, the small vendors are entirely brazen about selling you well-crafted fakes. Typically, the bare cards are just sitting loose in trays in the display case; once you agree on the price and commit to buying the card, the vendor will toss the loose card into a “real” Kingston retail package, and then miraculously pull out a certificate, complete with hologram, serial numbers, and a you can visit to validate your purchase, and slap it on the back of the retail package right in front of your eyes.
Hey, it’s just like new! I suppose the typical buyer in those markets is not an end user, but someone who is looking to make a quick buck reselling these cards at a hefty markup in a more reputable retail outlet. One vendor in particular interested me; it was literally a mom, pop and one young child sitting in a small stall of the mobile phone market, and they were busily slapping dozens of non-Kingston marked cards into Kingston retail packaging. They had no desire to sell to me, but I was persistent; this card interested me in particular because it also had the broken “D” logo but no Kingston marking. Above is a scan of the card and the package it came in (a larger image of the card can be seen below; it is “Sample #4”). After collecting all the samples, I read out their card ID information, and then digested their packages with nitric acid.
Below is the line-up of the cards I digested. Yes, my digestion technique is pretty crude. Actually, most of the damage to the card came from the cleaning process — I was using a Q-tip with acetone to remove the dissolved encapsulant and I had to get a little rough, which doesn’t do any favors for the bond wires. Butgood enough for my purposes. Click on the image above for a full-sized version. Some notes on the cards above:.
Sample 1: This is the original irregular card that got me started on this whole arc. It was purchased through a sanctioned Kingston distributor in China, and to the best of my knowledge, none were shipped to end customers of chumby. MID = 0x000041, OEMID = 0x3432, serial = 0x960, name = SD2GB. Sample 2: This is a normal card that I also purchased from the same sanctioned Kingston distributor in China, and is typical of those actually shipped in the first lot of chumby Ones MID = 0x000002, OEMID = 0x544D, serial = 0x9C62CAE6, name = SA02G. Sample 3: This is a Kingston card purchased through a major US retail chain. Note how the MID and OEMID are identical to sample 2, but not sample 1.
MID = 0x000002, OEMID = 0x544D, serial = 0xA6EDFA97, name = SD02G. Sample 4: This is the aforementioned non-Kingston branded card that I spotted being slapped into Kingston-marked packaging, bought on the open market in Shenzhen. Note the low serial number. MID = 0x000012, OEMID = 0x3456, serial = 0x253, name = MS.
Sample 5: This is a device bought from a more established retailer in the Shenzhen market, but still questionable. I bought it because it had the XXX.A00LF marking, like my original irregular card. MID = 0x000027, OEMID = 0x5048, serial = 0x7CA01E9C, name = SD2GB. Sample 6: This is a SanDisk card bought on the open market from a sketchy shop run by a sassy chain-smoking girl who wouldn’t stop texting on her mobile.
I actually acquired three total SanDisk cards from different sketchy sources but all of them checked out with the same CID info, so I only opened one of them. Interestingly, one SanDisk card turned out to be used and only quick-formatted. With the help of some, I found DLLs, WAV’s, maps, and verisign certificates belonging to inside the drive. A project for another day will be acquiring lots of refurb microSD cards and collecting interesting data off of them. MID = 0x000003, OEMID = 0x5344, serial = 0x114E933D, name = SU02G. Sample 7: This is a Samsung card that we bought from a Samsung wholesale distributor.
I didn’t scan this one before digesting it, so the image of it is missing but the card actually has no markings on the outside — it’s a total blank card with just a laser mark on the back. From appearances alone, it would look to be the sketchiest of the bunch, but in reality it’s one of the best built. Goes to show you can’t judge a book by its cover. MID = 0x00001B, OEMID = 0x534D, serial = 0xB1FE8A54, name = 00000 That’s a lot of data for a blog post, but I figured more details are better for sharing, since I could find no central database for this kind of information on the web. Here are the most interesting “high level” results from my survey:. The “normal” Kingston cards (samples #2 and #3) were all direct Toshiba OEM cards (MID = 0x000002, OEMID = 0x544D (ASCII ‘TM’, presumably for Toshiba Memory)). These cards employ Toshiba controllers and Toshiba memory chips, and seem to be of good quality, and thankfully the only ones that were sent on to chumby customers.
The irregular card (sample #1) uses the same controller chip as the outright fake (sample #4) that was bought in the SZ market. Both the irregular Kingston and the fake Kingston had low serial numbers and whacky ID information. Some of these cards experience some difficulty in normal operation. I still hesitate to call Kingston’s irregular card a fake — that’s a very strong accusation to make — but its construction is similar to another card of clearly questionable quality, which leads me to question Kingston’s judgment in picking authorized manufacturing partners. The irregular card is the only card in the group that does not use a stacked CSP construction. Instead, it uses side-by-side bonding. The only two memory chip foundries in this sample set were Toshiba/Sandisk and Samsung.
Note that Sandisk and Toshiba that makes their memory chips. Samsung’s NAND die — the most expensive part of a microSD card — is about 17% larger than Toshiba/Sandisk. This means that Samsung microSD cards should naturally carry a slightly higher price than Toshiba/Sandisk cards.
However, Samsung does get to offset that against the ability to diversify the same die from microSD packages into street-packaged TSOP devices, and they also don’t have a middleman like Kingston to eat away at margins. 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 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. 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. Overall, the MicroSD card market is a fascinating one, a discussion perhaps worth a blog post on its own. I’d like to point out to casual readers that the spot price of MicroSD cards is nearly identical to the spot price of the very same NAND FLASH chips used on the inside. In other words, the extra controller IC inside the microSD card is sold to you “for free”.
The economics that drive this are fascinating, but in a nutshell, my suspicion is that incorporating the controller into the package and having it test, manage and mark bad blocks more than offsets the cost of testing each memory chip individually. A full bad block scan can take a long time on a large FLASH IC, and chip testers cost millions of dollars. Therefore, the amortized cost per chip for test alone can be comparable to the cost of silicon itself.
To ground this in solid numbers, suppose a production-grade memory tester costs one million dollars. If you take one million dollars and divide it by the number of seconds over a five year period (a typical depreciation lifespan for such equipment), the equipment “costs” $0.00634 per second. Thus, a thirty second test costs you $0.00634/second x 30 seconds = $0.19. This is comparable to the raw die cost of the controller IC, according to my models; and by making the controllers very smart (the Samsung controller is a 32-bit ARM7TDMI with 128k of code), you get to omit this expensive test step while delivering extra value to customers — I love the fact that when I put on my linux kernel hacker hat, I can be completely oblivious to the existence of bad blocks and use mature filesystems like ext3 instead of JFFS2, at no extra cost to end customers like you. Isn’t it fun to connect the dots, all the way from silicon die markings to the linux kernel to end users, and all the businesses in between?
In the end, I’d have to say that both and Samsung look like they might be superior wholesale vendors to for memory cards due to their more direct control of their respective supply chains. Unfortunately, you can’t buy Samsung-branded cards on the retail market, as far as I know — Samsung only sells their cards to wholesalers who then rebrand and/or resell the card, and like Kingston these non- brands may blend their vendors so it’s hard to say if you’re getting the best card or simply a usable card. This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 3:35 am and is filed under,. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed. 311 Responses to “On MicroSD Problems”. I’m just a US consumer, and a minor eletronics enthusiast. I love the work you’ve done here, and would love to read similar works on other (re)branded memory chips. A lot of work (and writing!) goes into benchmarking and the like, but very little actually goes into testing the quality of memory. It’s utterly astonishing that you’ve done this on your own, and the results speak for themselves!
You could have an entirely new business reviewing various memory chips. “so it’s hard to say if you’re getting the best card or simply a usable card.”. Hi Bunny, Really interesting post.
I have something to add: about a year ago I bought a Kingston microSD card from an Amazon marketplace seller. It came with an adaptor that strangely was a few mm too wide for an SD slot. This arose my suspicions so I emailed Kingston, providing them with pictures of the card ( ). It looks very similar to your sample. I received email confirmation that it was a counterfeit card: “Based on the images provided, I am sorry to confirm that the part is not a genuine Kingston product The numbers on the card are not our serial numbers. Someone had to imitate them.” It seems like we’re receiving different explanations.
Thanks for writing this article. I have to second Tony, I’m an electronics enthusiast and really enjoyed this article.
Your note about removing the plastic with acid hit a chord with me. In high school I had to do the old find the density of a penny project where you measured how much water it displaced (I think that was the goal). Instead a friend and I broke the penny in half and weighed it before and after using acid to remove the zinc middle. We then used the atomic weights of the metals involved to calculate things based on the penny’s original weight and the weight of the remaining copper. Convoluted and cumbersome, it was a lot of fun!
Now that I think about it, the fun was the best part as I can’t remember if density was what we were really even after Thanks for this great article. The time you put into it is much appreciated and your blog is now bookmarked for future visits. G, When we start using political prisoners as slave labor I’ll agree with you. When we start executing prisoners to provide organs for re-sale, I’ll agree with you. When we start censoring the Internet, I’ll agree with you. When people like you. Who dissent, start being censored and imprisoned, instead of simply being taken to task by others for your folly, then I’ll agree that we are pretty much the same as China.
To be sure, we have a political faction in power at the moment that would love to make us the same as China, but they haven’t won yet. I have two friends who were standing among the other students at Tiananmen Square when the tanks rolled. Although they survived, they were also systematically persecuted for years thereafter. If their parents had not been well connected in a very large and powerful Chinese company, it would have gone much worse for them.
My wife and I have more or less “adopted” a young Taiwanese woman, currently a university student. She is very much a part of out family, and here in the US, we are very much part of her family. I know the fear she has for the safety of her family living in Taipei if the Chinese decide to take Taiwan.
Already they are strongly influencing events there. Her brother is in the Taiwanese military, and at particular risk. But most of all, she is native Taiwanese, not Chinese, and so as part of the minority, in a country long overwhelmed by foreigners, her family is at particular risk for persecution. For those who are unaware, the native Taiwanese are ethnographically Malay-Polynesian, and have weathered repeated onslaughts, persecution, and near genocide from deposed and displaced Chinese regimes, as well as being subjugated by the Dutch, the Japanese, and whoever else found Taiwan a valuable spot to occupy. Is our country perfect?
No, of course not. We make mistakes, and being made up of human beings, some of whom chose evil over good, bad things have been done in our name. But I will put our overall record of standing for what is good and right alongside that of any other country in the world. It is those people, like you, who wish to draw everything down to the lowest common denominator, and assert that no one has the moral standing to speak out and criticize, it is those people who are the enablers of the world’s great evils. So smirk sanctimoniously if you wish.
Mock those who speak up, deriding them as outdated anachronisms and nationalist bigots. But I will stand with them, and you can stand alongside Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin, with your assertion that the US is just as bad. I will stand with a frail, sweet, young Taiwanese woman, and you can stand with the people bent on destroying her, her family, and her culture, a culture of whose existence you are probably unaware. Much as they decimated the Mongolian culture of my friends from Tiananmen Square, turning its remnants into a “state cultural treasure” to be used to promote tourism. Perhaps the now suppressed Taiwanese puppetry will one day have such an “honor”. You may be tempted to drag out the sins of our dusty past, and to be sure, they exist.
But I live in the here and now. I know and oppose the present dangers, and can only ask forgiveness for errors of an earlier time. I don’t hear China acknowledging the sins of her past, nor do I see her government turning away from the sins of her present, including the oppression of Tibet, the threatening of Taiwan, the imprisonment and torture of Falun Gong practitioners, or the arrest of Huang Qi for the simple act of criticizing the government’s response to the earthquake in Sichuan. Tell me, how many were arrested for criticizing the government here for the handling of the hurricane in New Orleans, even the ones making the absurd and scurrilous charges that the levees were dynamited by secret government operatives?
G, you are a fool. I just wish that you were a harmless fool. Instead, you are a dangerous one.
Please read my comment above. And what America only, non-globally diversified company, or company without branches in China should I buy from mentioned in this article? Or not mentioned in this article? I believe there are some (not all) that are hypocrites here, including one mentioning 10 fold amount of information which could be summed up in a few simple lines,.cou,B.Mused,gh. I do agree, however, that you should consider the ethics of the country in which a company resides, including researching if that company supports or rejects those ethical issues. They may be on the frontier of pushing the a country out of the bad ethics they are surrounded.
But each person has a set of their own ethics/morals, and thus should be researched on their own. Here is not the place to discuss those. Interestingly, larger Kingston-branded microSD cards I’ve purchased in Canada and the US (8GB/16GB size) seem to have the lot number silkscreened on the front with the exact same ink as the label itself. Like Sample #5, everything seems screened in one pass, and no, mine don’t have the broken “D” in MicroSD. The back does have the same lot number sticker as your Sample #3, so I suspect they’re genuine (and I’ve not had a lick of difficulty with them!) Your theory about Sandisk/Toshiba selling A-/B+ parts to Kingston makes sense. Assuming my larger cards have the same stacked CSP construction (unlike your irregular unit), Sandisk/Toshiba might complete all the packaging and send unlabelled cards to Kingston’s fab, who then do as they please – including labelling them with whatever markings they want.
In your scenario, presumably the ghost shifter didn’t bother to setup the part of printer that actually read the codes off of each device before using them to print onto the plastic package, and what you’re seeing are the default values in the machine. I wonder if the microSD fixtures that might be used in such a silkscreener line are readily available, and their code or behaviour might be perused. Does the name Bunnie Huang ring a bell? It might if you were around the Xbox “scene” in 2002, when people from all over the world were on Xbox hacking forums trying to figure out what made Microsoft’s first console tick, so to speak. It was truly exciting—we’re talking Paris in the 50s exciting. Huang has since gotten a job at Chumby, putting his technical know-how to good use and helping to create the adorable little clock-widget-thing.
While in China, Mr. Huang discovered a problem with a number of Kingston-branded microSD cards that were to be used in Chumby production. The problem was that they were counterfeit, or “irregular” in the measured parlance of the blog post. Very Interesting. I had some trouble with a 4Gb flash just before christmas. The external packaging look more like you sample #2.
Solid D and laser etch batched code. So do the entries in /sys/bus/mmc/devices. I put down the issues I was having to to MMC bus contention as I could only trigger them by working the wireless – which looked on the device I was using the card with tho be connected via sdio – and the card hard at the same time. Interestingly though changing to a Sandisk card a lot of this went away. Now there may be bugs in the linux S32C420 sdio implementation – but it interesting what you say about the kingston controller in hindsight. Unfortunately I don’t really have the time or knowledge /documentaion of the sdio details to do any debugging – not when I found a Kingston cards works. Fortuantely this is for a one-ff project so I don’t have thousand of cards to deal with.
Have you consider that these ‘irregular’ cards migth not be Kingston and they bought them to get them off the market, this doesn’t play well with the rest of the economics you’ve found though. Bunnie, Much like wohall, I have a Kingston branded 4GB microSD card whose lot number (N0160-002.A00LF) appears to have been silkscreened onto the card casing using the same ink as the rest of the label. I also have an unbroken D on my card. Interestingly, the microSD - SD card adapter that came with it does have a broken D on it, though.
Like your original irregular card, Sample #1, my card has odd values: name: SD4GB date: 00/2000 manfid: 0x000041 oemid: 0x3432 serial: 0x00000c61 scr: 000000 fwrev: 0x0 hwrev: 0x2. We order Kingston microSD cards from a North American vendor for a WinCE product (the SDC/2GB card). I have a couple of cards that don’t work in my microSD reader/writer. They match Bunnie’s descriptions and silk-screening–broken D, lot code of N0181-006.A00LF.
Here’s the really crazy thing: the cards don’t work in the microSD slot on my reader, BUT they work if I plug them into a microSD adapter, and into the SD slot (which is on the same reader). Really strange, as the adapter is purely a connectivity thing, no electronics involved. Also, the working microSDs show up as “Removable Disk (E)” in My Computer.
The ones with weird markings that only show up via the SD adapter, when I plug those in to the reader, the “Removable Disk (E)” suddenly starts displaying “Kingston (E)”. I’m going to take photos of these cards and phone my vendor and link him to this blog post. Between this product and another, we bought about 3K SD cards last year, and we’ll be using another 8K this year, so I’m hoping we’ll get some action. Further to my earlier post, the bootloader on our product spits out some card details, so here are the results.
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The two A00LF cards report Manf ID of 0x41, part # of SD2GB. These are the cards that don’t work properly. The manufacturing date and serial # are sensible values–October 2009 and ). Product revision is 2.0. OEM ID is ASCII 42 (0x3432).
The regular working cards have Manf ID of 2 and part # of SA02G. Product revision is 0.3, and manf. Date is March 2009.
OEM ID is ASCII “TM” (0x544d). I don’t spit out CID values, but CID is made up of MID, OID, PNM, PRV, PSN, MDT and CRC, as you can see by checking Bunnie’s results. I’m in R&D, not at the production facility, so I don’t have a huge number of cards around here, but I’m going to test what I’ve got, and then we’ll be talking to the vendor and/or Kingston. Will keep people posted if there’s interest. The procedure iss a little bit tricky and machine-specific.
You can’t just have the card mounted as a USB drive via an SD – to – USB converter, since the USB converter hides all of the details of the SD card from the host; you need to have a native SD card interface, like those found on many mobile phones or, as it happens to be, on the chumby One. Once you have the card mounted via a native SD interface, you should be able to find an entry in the /sys directory tree that looks a bit like /sys/devices/platform/cpuxxx-mmc.n/mmchost/mmc0 where cpuxxx-mmc.n will be platform-specific.
From that directory you will see a subdirectory with a format like mmc0-nnnn, which will have a number of files that contain the CID and CSD data structures. From there you can just do cat.
(or grep. if you want prettier output) and get all the card data. Has anyone identified low-cost adapters or carrier boards with holders for SD cards, mini-SD cards, and micro-SD cards that when plugged into desktop computers’ mainboards will work to read out the electronic card ID data?
Hopefully, a free live CD Linux version like the 100MB Puppy Linux, for example, can be used with the adapters or boards to obtain the data. Two types of adverse events come to mind that should increase demand somewhat for the above types of devices are: 1) Having a list of your cards’ ID numbers to write on police reports should make it more likely to recover them should they be stolen. In addition, should a nefarious person add a card to your collection of cards, you might have a somewhat better chance of proving that the added card does not belong to you if you have a list of your cards’ IDs. 2) After the all-important random write speed tests have been performed and your faster cards have been identified, knowing their ID numbers makes it possible to recover them should they be accidentally mixed with slower speed cards.
Reference – Random write speed testing: CrystalDiskMark An adapter or board with only a single SD card socket may be less expensive, but it should be able to read the data of both mini-SD and micro-SD cards that are inserted via adapters into the SD card socket. It would save a lot of time to have the card slots on the front panels of the desktop PCs, but this may increase the installed cost. Hopefully, low-cost boards or adapters can be found. The following devices might be good candidates: 40-Pin IDE Flash Drive Carrier Board with a SD card Interface 40-Pin Male IDE To SD Card Adapter It would probably take too much time to read a lot of card IDs with an old laptop that does not have a card slot, but the following type of adapter might work even if the laptop runs slowly from a SD card such that most users will not be satisfied: Secure Digital 44-Pin 2.5″ IDE To SD Card Adapter.
Just because you purchased from a Kingston authorized distributor doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to make a quick buck. It’s quite possible that the distributor knowingly purchased/manufactured a batch of counterfeits/sub-grade and used their authorized distributor status to pass them off as genuine. This is very likely given the aggressive lead times and pricing. Incidentally, this is probably how counterfeits get into the major retail chains. A retail store buys from an authorized distributor who ships them fakes, which ends up with the consumer. I was in China in the early part of Dec’09 and was struck by the large amount of Kingston memory products available from various shop vendors at, once you started bargaining, too good to be true prices.
So I demurred on buying because it seemed fishy, even though as far as I could tell the packaging was A-1 legit. A bit later in the trip, on the electronics street in Nanjing I noticed Kingston USB Memory Sticks being packaged into bubble packs in a little shop by a teenaged girl and, presumably, her mother. As I say, you could not tell the difference from proper Kingston packaging that you find in North America, but it did leave me wondering.
Very happy that you took the time to investigate and publish your findings. I ran a small IT retail business for a number of years. The rebranding that goes on within the industry is truly something to behold. I’ve seen every brand rebadged as just about every other brand. The karate kid 2010 full movie new release hd free download. Perhaps the funniest was Corsair chips sold as Kingston.
These were all through regular wholesale channels so as bunnie says Kingston don’t make any of their own stuff, or at least not very much. The “A00LF” part number is pretty common, it’s just a numbering system & not anything more than that. Only thing to add is a customer who bought a microSD card off eBay & came to me for a replacement when it didn’t work. This was the fakest of fakes, instead of the gold contact there was just a bit of plastic crudely glued on lol. He was greatly relieved when my supplied card registered as soon as he popped it in his phone. So many stories, maybe I should write a book!
Rogue worker ≠ rouge worker Photographer here. I purchased an 8 Gig Lexar CF card from a major US photography equipment supplier a couple of years ago, encountered repeat read errors. After holding onto the card for almost a year, I contacted Lexar and with some resistance I was able to set up a warranty replacement. The replacement card shared all the same outside markings. It also produced the same identical error. I stopped using it and only use SanDisk without problems. I assumed it was a Camera/Card interoperability problem, but after reading this I have to wonder.
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