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. And as it turns out, yes! I also purchased a 1024GB card — and it turned out to be a 32GB card, while this card turned out to be…well…a 32GB card (with just slightly more capacity than the fake 1024GB card).
In my experience, sellers who sell knockoff cards usually follow a pretty similar M.O.: they steal the name of a well-known, respected electronics manufacturer who isn’t particularly known for selling flash media (or usually any storage media whatsoever). In this respect, Sony was a prime target for these sellers. They then siphon some of the established brand’s reputation and use it to make money for themselves. Why do they target manufacturers that don’t sell flash media? I don’t know — perhaps they’re just targeting large, respected brands; or perhaps they’re doing it so that it’s harder to disprove that their product is genuine. After all, if there’s no genuine article to compare it to, then it’s harder for someone to say that a knockoff product isn’t genuine. All that said, I heavily suspected that this card was going to be a knockoff when I ordered it, and the generic red packaging that it arrived in only confirmed it.
Performance on this card was pretty mediocre overall, bordering on just plain poor. All metrics were below average, with all scores being in the bottom 3/8 of all cards (or worse) as of the time of this writing. Compared to the other knockoff cards I evaluated, however, this card actually did quite well: all scores were above average. These scores were enough to merit the Class 10 and U1 markings it carries; however, both random read and random write performance fell short of the threshold for the A1 marking. I honestly don’t think there’s any way that this card would qualify for the A1 marking — and I can say that because I’m not scared of “Sony” coming after me for that comment.
On the endurance front — most of the cards I’ve tested have failed before they reached the 50% failure threshold.. To this one’s credit (or not? I’m not sure), it kept chugging along right up until it hit that threshold. Don’t get me wrong — this card is still nothing to write home about, especially since it couldn’t go 2,000 read/write cycles without an error…or at all. Here’s what the progression for this card looked like:
Overall? Performance was pretty poor, endurance was pretty poor, and the fact that it’s a knockoff means that I wouldn’t trust any of this seller’s products. Don’t buy these — they’re trash.
June 10, 2025