Disclaimer: I don’t think Sony had anything to do with this card. I think this is an unlicensed knock-off (hence why “Sony” is in quotes).
This is a card that I found while browsing through microSD cards on AliExpress. I was curious to know whether there were any sellers selling both fake flash and authentic flash under the same brand name. Unsurprisingly, this card turned out to be fake flash — which I heavily suspected would be the case when I ordered it. However, it was a bit of a surprise that it turned out to have 32GB of space — as opposed to some of the other fake cards I have, which were 4GB and 8GB.
This card bears a number of hallmarks of fake flash: they bear the name of a well-known electronics manufacturer, even though that manufacturer is not known for selling flash memory (in this case it’s Sony, but I’ve seen Lenovo and Xiaomi caught up in the crossfire here as well); the manufacturer ID and OEM ID have been zeroed out from the CID register in an attempt to mask their true origin; and performance across the board was pretty abysmal.
This card was particularly abysmal in terms of performance — even when compared to other knockoff cards I evaluated — with all metrics scoring in the bottom 10th percentile (as of this writing). It was barely enough to merit the Class 10 and U1 marks that it bore, but it fell well short of the speeds it would need to merit the A1 mark. (I normally throw a disclaimer in here that my performance testing methods don’t line up with the ones prescribed by the SD standard — but I highly doubt that it would have met the A1 performance threshold even if it had been tested properly.)
Where this card surprised me was on its endurance tests: it only managed to go for 359 read/write cycles before it started showing issues, and only 460 cycles before it stopped responding to commands. This puts it well below average, even when compared to the other knockoff cards I tested, and — as of the time of this writing — the knockoff card that has survived the least number of read/write cycles before failing. Since it got close enough to the 50% failure threshold before failing (it made it to about 28%), here’s the graph of its progression through the endurance test:
I do have two other samples, but they were purchased much later and are likely not from the same batch as this card. They are currently in the package waiting to be tested.
June 10, 2025