It boggles my mind people still perceive Kingston as a good brand. This self-proclaimed "largest independent memory (module) manufacturer" is average at best and kind of
scammy.
Kingston has had other divisions come and go - did you know they used to make SCSI storage enclosures? I suspect their SSD group will be around for a while yet, though. But, as was pointed out earlier, the SSD part change happened some years ago.
I've had good experiences with Kingston, to the extent that when a module failed under their lifetime warranty and they no longer sold it, they either provided a better-spec compatible module, hand-assembled a replacement, or bought a manufacturer's module and had it shipped to me. The last case was on a DEC Alpha DS10 which used unique proprietary modules. They ordered new replacements from HP, directly shipped to me from HP.
Back when SIMM modules were new (instead of individual RAM chips) I categorized vendors into 3 categories:
1) Chip manufacturers who put their chips on their own board and sold them.
2) Board manufacturers who had signed long-term, high-volume agreements to put a chip manufacturer's chips on the board company's board (this is where Kingston fit in).
3) Board "manufacturers" who probably contracted out PCB manufacture and put whatever chips they could get on the board, including different manufacturers on the same board. We called these the "floor sweeping" boards because they used whatever chips they could find on the floor. Note that there is one valid case for different manufacturers - some boards used different chips for the parity bit(s). For example, qty 2 4-bit chips for 8 data bits and qty 1 1-bit chip for parity.
Western Digital has had a habit for over a decade (probably closer to 2) of changing the internal specs of their spinning-rust drives, generally to reduce the number of platters as they increase areal density, without changing the model number. Quite recently, both WD and Seagate were caught passing off shingled (SMR) drives as conventional (CMR) drives, even in their "intended for NAS" product line.
The really stupid thing about this was that they were doing it on their low-capacity drives to save a platter, not on high-capacity drives where it might have had a technical justification. After an initial "most consumers will never notice this" from WD, the global flaming resulted in them admitting it and promising to be more forthcoming in product descriptions going forward. I don't know if Seagate has made the same commitment.
And if you want to talk about scammy (I'd describe this next bit as fraudulent), when a particular memory manufacturer got started, they ground off the tops of the memory chips they were importing and printed a little American flag on the top, along with their own part number. But if you looked at the bottom of the chip, it was imprinted with "KOREA". They also tried to get the US government to sanction/ban the Asian manufacturers for "dumping" (selling below cost) at the same time. That's the reason I refuse to purchase from that memory manufacturer, or their affiliated / house brands, to this day.
