About two decades ago, there was a nice article about a hierarchy of memory cards. The chips are binned: - Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products -

About two decades ago, there was a nice article about a hierarchy of memory cards. The chips are binned: - Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products - Defective chips have the defective parts disabled, and were placed in products on tier down. A 16MB chip might be sold as an 8MB. - Unreliable chips were given various error correcting techniques, and are placed in cheap, off-brand parts, as well as non-critical applications (such as, at the time, answering machines). A common technique was to scatter addresses, so errors were randomly distributed. For answering machines, this meant a little bit of static. For other applications, this meant a bit of ECC would make them quasi-reliable. Cards and chips down the line failed a lot more than at the top. I have had a few memory cards fail before. I am glad to pay for top-line parts. The premium I'm willing to pay is in the low tens of dollars, which is what Sandisk used to do.