Insanity of Scale
We <i>accidentally</i> stepped on an SD card, and what we found inside mystifies me.
We accidentally stepped on an SD card, and what we found inside mystifies me.
Wait - that looks like a micro SD card! Why in the world...
The back reads:
5123ACA-7A KOR
S VHL463PA 704
Crazy. Someone took a magic marker to every microSD card (under marker reads '512MB MMCmicro'), and then hand soldered them onto a small PCB to create a larger SD card. Talk about economies of scale. There must have been a huge batch of microSD cards and a perceived shortage of full size SD cards? I can't explain it. Why in the world would one pay money to solder these things together when a microSD to SD adapter ships free of charge with every microSD card? The micro card size looks a bit off. Maybe it was ill formed MMC cards and they wanted to salvage the memory so they made SD cards out of the micro cards. We will probably never know.
According to wikipedia, a "MMC Micro" card is NOT QUITE the same as a microSD card. So perhaps someone made a large lot of MMC-micro cards, only to discover that MMC "lost" to SD, and put them inside the SD case instead. If they're really MMC cards inside, they may not support the full SD featureSet, but then a lot of things that use SD cards wouldn't care anyway...
What's even crazier is how "we" stepped on an SD card-- quite a trick...;)
I think you're on the right track-- looks like a simple way to deal with a QA problem if MMC cards' pins don't lining up to their cases correctly.