Philips is a major multinational electronics manufacturer. Founded in the Netherlands in 1891, they grew into one of the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturers before paring down their business to focus primarily on healthcare products starting in the 2010’s. Philips consumer products continue to be manufactured and sold — with Philips selling the naming rights to a number of different companies — and they continue to remain a household name to this day.
Their household name status is what makes this card particularly disappointing.
I actually purchased six of these cards — three for the standard “continuous” endurance test, and three for the thermal cycling test — from AliExpress in November of 2024. I’m going to look at all six of them together.
The first thing to look at is the information in the card’s registers — which show a few irregularities:
- Samples #1 and #2 have a manufacturing date from 2011, while the other four all have manufacturing dates in 2024. Visually, however, all six samples are identical — I find that to be highly unlikely if they were manufactured 13 years apart.
- The OEM ID is set to
3456— an OEM ID which I’m not convinced has been assigned to any manufacturer by the SD Association. - The product name is set to just
SD— which, while not necessarily an irregularity, is enough to disqualify it from being considered a name brand card under my rules for determining what’s considered a name brand. - The cards carry the U1, V10, and A1 performance marks — but the information in the SSR register indicates that they don’t support any of these. (The Video Speed Class specification didn’t come out until 2016, and the Application Speed Class specification didn’t come out until 2017. If these had been manufactured in 2011, there’s no way they would have been able to conform to those specifications.)
So just based off of this information alone, I’m already dubious about these cards. I started to suspect that they were knock-offs, but I couldn’t find any direct evidence that they were.
But…the real disappointment came when I started to run them through my stress testing program.
My program runs a couple of tests on the card before it starts to perform endurance testing:
- First, it runs a capacity test to determine whether the card is fake flash or not.
- Then, it performs a series of 30-second long performance tests: one to determine sequential read speeds, one to determine sequential write speeds, one to determine random read speeds, and one to determine random write speeds.
All six cards failed at the exact same point in this process: during the random write test. They made it through the first three tests just fine — albeit with some shitty results — but after going through about 20 seconds of the random write test, they would just stop responding to commands. And this wasn’t a temporary thing: when I moved them to another reader, they still refused to respond to commands.
My teachers in school used to tell me that “zeroes don’t average well” — and this result certainly isn’t going to help my results here — but I don’t think I have any other choice: they endured zero rounds of read/write testing before failing completely.
I know I’ve referred to other microSD cards as garbage, but I think these really are garbage. If they can fail this easily, then they’re not good enough to hold any data for any purpose. Don’t buy these — they’re probably the worst microSD cards I’ve ever reviewed.
March 12, 2026