I just found a offer for SanDisk Extreme PRO microSD card for below £35 refurb, whilst the new one is at least twice more. They also supply it with the UHS-II microSD to SD adapter. Do anyone have any experience in using SanDisk refurbished cards? Do they have plenty of lifespan left?
I’m looking for some UHS-II card for my digital camera, and full size SD 128GB goes far over £100, whilst microSd is only 275mb/s vs 300 for SDXC, so it is not a massive difference.
Any advise welcome
you gotta wonder … how do you “Refurbish” a tiny piece of plastic with micro chips inside and no moving parts ? give it wipe ?
I’ve never purchased anything refurbished … because, basically it means it’s been used.
SD cards have a finite Read/Write cycle of Data … how do know how much it was used by the previous owner ?
Personally, i would rather pay the extra $$ for peace of mind that i’m buying something brand new and never been used.
Ok,
i was doing a research today, spoke with the semiconductor engineer and got some information regarding the refurbishment of the memory cards.
Actually , this “piece of plastic”- is not a plastic but epoxy compound.
As per manufacturing process the chip does not have exact capacity of 128 or 256GB etc, all chips have good and bad " blocks, and depending of quantity of these blocks the chip is assigned the final capacity.
For example 100 chips had been grown, and the total capacity is about 438GB each.
The very good ones, which have less bad blocks assigned capacity of 400gb by the controller, not so goods ones limited to 256GB, and the worst assigned 128GB capacity.
During the refurbishment, the total wear of the blocks is assessed and if the number of bad blocks increased and cannot be compensated by remaining good block the nominal capacity decrease, and 256GB card becomes 128GB. Also the pin pads are replaced and card might be reprinted.
So i’m not sure if the SanDisk use this process for refurbishing cards or not, but seems this is a plausible explanation.
In regards to lifespan, the 128GB card will become redundant and not usable in less than 10 years.
So this does not worry me to much.
Hope you would find this information useful.
