Insanity of Scale

by Nate
April 29, 2008

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.

http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/SD2.jpg

Wait - that looks like a micro SD card! Why in the world...
The back reads:
5123ACA-7A KOR
S VHL463PA 704

http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/news/SD1.jpg

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.