Hi everyone,

I am a backer on what seems to be a scam Kickstarter Campaign for Storaxa. It was supposed to be a NAS system with the choice of AMD or Intel CPU. It’s been over a year already and no one has received this product.

Some of us, however, did receive a MicroSD card in what was supposed to be a “test” for shipping. Storaxa said some of the MicroSD were found to be fakes and there was supposed to be a second shipping round. Luckily, my 32GB MicroSD card was not a fake after running a test with h2testw on Linux.

The MicroSD card turned out to be well with speeds reaching about 30MB/s, which is good for a Class 10 speed card. I installed Kubuntu in it and used it in the past few months. Going all the way until yesterday, the card was working great.

So, what happened? I was doing a usual sudo apt update followed by sudo apt upgrade when Linux suddenly displayed a black screen with errors saying that it failed to read. Turns out that the MicroSD card died at this point.

It seems that the endurance of these cards is not really great. Making things worse, its controller is one of those that decides to kill itself rather than turn the card into a read-only state. This prevents us from doing data recovery by ourselves.

Below, we can see the front and back of this MicroSD card:

It is unknown who is the manufacturer of this card. I could not find any information related to the markings on the back except for the part that reads AS2703. A search seem to say it is an SD controller made by Asolid.

The rest of the markings read as follow:

MMCOR32G8T23-TO
FRH AS2703 2306
MADE IN TAIWAN

Regarding the installed Linux system, I ran dd the night before, so I have a working backup of the system. That said, I cannot recommend using the Storaxa MicroSD card for an operating system installation. It is going to wear it out rapidly as the NAND does not seem to be able to tolerate that workload.