ALUNX is a brand that I came across while browsing through microSD cards on AliExpress. I purchased this one…frankly…because I liked the card art that they used. What can I say? (Squirrel!)
This particular purchase almost had me filing a dispute with the seller on AliExpress — when it arrived, it looked like the seller only sent one card. On closer inspection, however, I could tell that the plastic on the front of the package was bowing a little — and when I opened it, I discovered that the seller had actually stuffed three cards into one package. Clever.
This card fails the criteria that I set out for name-brand cards for a few reasons:
- As far as I can tell, the vendor doesn’t sell more than just microSD cards.
- As far as I can tell, the vendor doesn’t have a website that shows the products they sell.
- It appears that there was an attempt to conceal the card’s true origin — specifically, the manufacturer ID (in the card’s CID register) is set to hex
fe.
However, it doesn’t meet the criteria for being a knockoff card — so that means that this card is going to be labelled as an off-brand card.
As of the time of this writing, I’ve only started testing a single sample. I was delighted to see that it wasn’t fake flash, and that sequential read and sequential write scores were above average; however, I was disappointed to see that random read/write scores were below average.
This card bears no performance marks. (There is something on the card that looks vaguely like a Class 6 mark — but on closer inspection, I think that’s just part of the card artwork.) The Class 10 mark appears on the package, and all performance measurements were good enough to qualify for this mark.
On the endurance testing front:
Sample #1’s first error was a write failure, affecting 64 contiguous sectors, during round 32. It survived until round 1,487, when I stopped it to run an upgrade on the host system. When it came back up, the card would not respond to commands. Ejecting the card and re-inserting it fixed this for about 10 minutes (not enough time to complete a single read/write cycle) — but then it stopped responding to commands altogether.
Since this card was tested on a machine whose USB bus was not constantly being saturated, I’ll include a graph here showing this card’s performance over time
What caused this card’s throughput to drop during the first couple days of endurance testing? Got me…
- Samples #2 and #3 are still in the package, waiting to be tested.
September 22, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles updates automatically every hour)