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SD card disassembly- Patriot LX 8gb comparison
  • svartsvart
    So while messing around with some of the patches, I found that one of my Patriot LX 8gb cards would work flawlessly even with some of Driftwood's extremely high bitrate patches. I have 3 other Patriot LX 8gb cards that I bought on sale while do not work with the same high bitrate patches.

    I wanted to know why, so I opened them up.

    Card 1: works with Terraquake. Uses 2x Toshiba TC58NVG5D2FTA00 IC's.
    Card 2: Does not work with Terraquake. Uses 1x Toshiba TH58NVG6D2FTA20 IC.

    I couldn't find datasheets on either though. I believe the TH prefix says that there are two dies in a single package, but am unsure.

    Looking at some of the specs for similar part numbers, I think the TH series has larger page and block sizes.
  • 4 Replies sorted by
  • driftwooddriftwood
    Interesting discovery.
  • svartsvart
    I was hoping to find that the ICs were different speed ratings but I couldn't find any datasheets.
  • plasmasmpplasmasmp
    Would explain why my early Patriot LX 8GB cards could easily record 75mb and 100mb GH13 and people a year later bought the same card and it didn't work.
  • svartsvart
    That's exactly what happened to me. I bought the first card back with the GH1 and have been using it since. I bought a few more expecting to get the same performance for the price and.. nope.

    I think the Sandisk stuff is outrageously priced. Yes you are paying for speed but I doubt the ICs are any different.

    The Patriot cards have an IC covered with epoxy on the PCB as well. I'm trying to think of ways to get the epoxy off the board without being destructive so I can see what it is. It seems that a few, if not all, of the traces go through this IC before reaching the flash chip. Either it's a controller IC or it's ESD protection. Not sure which one it is yet.

    I was able to get the cards apart without tearing anything up. I *might* get one of the 45Mb/s sandisk cards and take it apart to compare.
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