Lenovo became a well-known computer manufacturer — at least, in my mind — after they acquired IBM’s PC manufacturing business in 2005, which included IBM’s ThinkPad line of laptops. Being that they are a major brand name, they are a frequent target for counterfeiters — AliExpress searches reveal a wide array of fake flash bearing the Lenovo brand name.
I purchased these after the surprise find of the Lenovo thinkplus 256GB — so far, the only 256GB card in my collection (as most 256GB cards fall outside of my price range). I wanted to see how the smaller version would do compared to its bigger sibling.
Spoiler: it didn’t do that great.
As of this writing, I’ve only tested a single card, so the discussion below will be based on the results of that single card.
I’m actually undecided on whether these cards are genuine or knockoffs. The card and the package both look genuine, but there’s one glaring issue that came up when I dumped this card’s registers: the manufacturer ID is set to ff, and the OEM ID is set to 5678. Because of this, they fail the criteria that I set out for determining what’s considered a name-brand card. However, I’m not quite ready to call them knockoffs — so they’ll get lumped in with the off-brand cards in my result set. At the very least, I’ll wait to see if the other two samples show anything different.
Price was fairly good, coming in at $0.073 per gigabyte — which is pretty well below average (as of the time of this writing). Skimp was also good — this card came in at 1.70%, which is a little better than the average (which, at the time of this writing, is sitting at about 1.80%).
Performance testing is kinda where this card fell flat on its face: sample #1 did pretty well below average on everything except for sequential write speeds (where it came in right about average):
- Sequential read speeds came in at the 20th percentile.
- Sequential write speeds came in at the 57th percentile.
- Random read speeds came in at the 12th percentile.
- Random write speeds came in at the 35th percentile.
These cards carry the Class 10, U3, V30, and A2 performance marks. Measured performance was good enough for it to qualify for the Class 10, U3, and V30 marks, but not the A2 mark. However, I’ll throw in my standard disclaimer: my performance testing methods do not align with those prescribed by the SD Physical Layer Specification. It’s entirely possible that this card would have done better had it been tested under proper conditions. In addition, no card I’ve tested so far has met the threshold for the A2 performance mark — and I think that has more to do with the fact that I don’t have the proper equipment to test for this.
On the performance testing front:
- Sample #1’s first error was a 14,333-sector wide address decoding error during round 948. It has survived 2,046 read/write cycles in total so far.
- Samples #2 and #3 are still in the package, waiting to be tested.
December 19, 2025