re: 32GB and 64GB MicroSD cards are insanely cheap today on Amazon

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Have not heard of Transcend before. Is this a reputable brand? I have always just bought sandisk.

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You'd be surprised how incestuous the market really is. Some of the top brands source their components from the same places. There are only a handful of independent manufacturers of flash memory controllers for SD Cards, pretty much all of them in Taiwan. There might be a German one. The controller chips are responsible for data management and interfacing with the device and are the most likely point of failure.

Did you know that SanDisk and Toshiba co-own the manufacturing facility that makes the NAND dies, and that while they sell their own SD cards, they also supply NAND dies to brands like Kingston and PNY?

But it doesn't necessarily mean that the companies that make their own NAND dies are inherently better. For example, since Toshiba/Sandisk manufactures for Kingston, and Kingston may accept only A+ binned units, it's possible that Sandisk takes the 'rejected' A- batches and sells them under the Sandisk name, so the middle-man Kingston could very well have a better quality chip.

As for Transcend, there is less information about who they supply to these days, but they are in the top 3-5 DRAM device vendors, and their history of distribution relationships with Kingston, Toshiba, Samsung, and Panasonic provides a strong enough hint as to what's inside the Transcend casing.