Branded vs unbranded Flash chips?

[natallica]

Hi everyone -

In taking apart various thumb drives while trying to learn I found that some will be branded with a Micron/Intel logo and some will just be stamped with number and letter combinations that do not help to identify the manufacturer. A tool like ChipGenius will read the chip ID and tell me the actual part number and manufacturer, but why do some chips come branded and others do not?

Is there a quality difference between the two?

Thanks!

[jeremyb]

There are a few possibilities..

Some OEM's (eg: PNY) request their name on the chip.

The chips are factory rejects or gray market chips. Manufactures have thresholds for how many bad blocks their memory chips can have, if that threshold is exceeded rather than loose the $, they sell the chips on the gray market without a label.