Why are SD cards so FRAGILE ?

[BarryW]

It must be your card.  I have a lexar 256 card that has survived 3 handhelds now.  I've even seen it take a 1 inch static arc last winter and still work.

[lareya]

My 1g SD card just bit the dust also.  I am so sad!  I have fdisk'd it, re formated it and many times over. But the problem is that I can never get it to stop being read only.  my camera doesn't recognize it now, and neither does my card reader. But the Z reads it - just read only.  It had done that twice before me, and all I did was reformat it, and it came back. But this last time - no such luck.  Now, I am afraid of getting another SD card. my card was a non brand, lot 0408AD6 w/ this stamped on the card 435ha-1gbtwn.   I format it with fat16.

anyhelp appreciated!

lareya

[dwagelaar]

I seem to have the same problem as jamesannan... Only I may have an idea what caused it.. First of all, my configuration:

- Zaurus SL-C860 / Sharp ROM 1.40JP
- Sandisk 512 MB SD card
- Sandisk Connect CF WiFi card

I store my music on the SD card and generally have the Sharp Music Player open. Whenever I switch the Zaurus on, there's a "please wait" message displayed by the music player, which then checks that all music files in the playlist are still there. If not, the music player removes those from the playlist.

Now I also read the bit about "noatime" in /etc/fstab, which is by default only set on the internal flash and not on the CF or SD memory cards(!). This means that on each startup (or rather: wakeup), the zaurus music player accesses all MP3s on my SD card and causes a write of the access times.

One time I was in a hurry and just switched off my zaurus before that annoying "please wait" screen of the music player was gone. Result: broken SD card... Exactly *how* broken? Well:

- fsck.vfat cannot read the /dev/mmcda1 partition
- mkfs.vfat also doesn't work
- fdisk cannot find /dev/mmcda
- badblocks does find the size of the card (495488), but runs very slowly and continues to mark *each* block as bad.
- lots of dmesg errors: see attachment.

[Olad]

I have a Canon 32mb SD card that I got used with my Z. It has served me very well, and never messed up on me. As for physical stress, one time I accidentally left it in my pocket and it went through the washer _and_ dryer - still works great. There was an article on I believe /. a while ago about durability of palms... and unless I am mistaken SD cards too.

From what I've read in this post, it would seem that people are only having problems with high-capacity SD cards, and I would offer this reason: Large capacity drives (of any type) are still in their testing stages (even though the manufacturers would like you to believe otherwise). Take a look at some reviews for 500GB external hard drives some time - they aren't reliable, they crash very frequently... it's because the companies are still working on trying to fit SO MUCH SPACE in VERY LITTLE MASS (think about it - 500GB external hard drives are big, yeah, but they're actually probably LESS than 500 times bigger than a 1gb SD card.

My Advice: Give the companies some slack and buy a couple of smaller cards instead.

[MrSquishy]

This doesnt help anyone at all, but I got pissed at a 16mb card that wouldnt format as ext2 so I cracked in open with a knife.  You know, to see if the elves inside were dead.  It will now format and I havent had any problems since then.  So if it really isnt working, try stabbing it.

Works on people too I hear.