I had a little 8 gig PNY USB stick go through the wash once, and since there wasn’t anything horribly critical on it, and I was curious, I cut it open to see if I could dry it out (didn’t want to stick it in a computer without making sure it was completely dry. To my surprise, I found that the actual chip was just an encapsulated bit of plastic with four electrodes, and fit entirely inside the USB connector shell. The actual working part was about the size of a micro-sd. The housing was just a convenient place to hold on, and gave someplace to hinge the cover off of. I just stuck the chip inside the shell, dropped a drop of superglue into it to hold it together, and put a lanyard through the hole in the shell that had let the housing hold onto it. Instant ultra-mini USB drive. Water didn’t do a bit of harm to it, by the way, and I don’t see how it could be destroyed by anything other than a sledgehammer blow. In fact the USB connector shell wasn’t even necessary, but without it the chip wasn’t quite thick enough to make good contact and had to be held in place. Still room to make it smaller.
So I am guessing that making a single size internal that fits the form factor of a microSD, then encapsulating inside a standard SD. One production run of memory card that forks into two casing stages. So the question is which manufacturers adopt this approach?
I suggest carefully disassembling the SD card prior to cutting it. I just chopped the PCB in my 8GB card in half by doing this
lol
lol
Pull the label off and shine a nice bright LED through it.
The plastic shell is so thin you can see where the PCB ends inside.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/imager/2191341036/
def. not possible with EVERY card
I had a little 8 gig PNY USB stick go through the wash once, and since there wasn’t anything horribly critical on it, and I was curious, I cut it open to see if I could dry it out (didn’t want to stick it in a computer without making sure it was completely dry. To my surprise, I found that the actual chip was just an encapsulated bit of plastic with four electrodes, and fit entirely inside the USB connector shell. The actual working part was about the size of a micro-sd. The housing was just a convenient place to hold on, and gave someplace to hinge the cover off of. I just stuck the chip inside the shell, dropped a drop of superglue into it to hold it together, and put a lanyard through the hole in the shell that had let the housing hold onto it. Instant ultra-mini USB drive. Water didn’t do a bit of harm to it, by the way, and I don’t see how it could be destroyed by anything other than a sledgehammer blow. In fact the USB connector shell wasn’t even necessary, but without it the chip wasn’t quite thick enough to make good contact and had to be held in place. Still room to make it smaller.
So I am guessing that making a single size internal that fits the form factor of a microSD, then encapsulating inside a standard SD. One production run of memory card that forks into two casing stages. So the question is which manufacturers adopt this approach?