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Mistakes to Avoid When Buying a MicroSD Card (2018)

118 points| peter_d_sherman | 6 years ago |makeuseof.com | reply

72 comments

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[+] brazzy|6 years ago|reply
> Counterfeit cards correctly report the capacity shown on the packaging, but actually contain far less. You won’t notice this until the card fills up unexpectedly quickly.

Oh, it's much worse than that. Counterfeit cards are often manipulated to lie to the OS about their capacity as well. They don't "fill up" at all, they just throw away your data, or overwrite it silently.

[+] jamiethompson|6 years ago|reply
This is my experience. Bought an SanDisk card to pop in my phone before I went on holiday. Changed my camera settings to save to the SD card. Great. I can stop worrying about filling up my phone's internal storage with photos now.

Then the card corrupted all of my photos.

[+] MisterTea|6 years ago|reply
That is downright evil. I suppose in order to find an evil card one would have to fill it with a file and then verify that files integrity, a very time consuming process form larger cards.
[+] cbanek|6 years ago|reply
> hardware that supports microSDXC slots won’t automatically support every size of card in this format. The Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, officially supports cards up to 400GB. There’s no guarantee that your 512GB card will work.

This part drives me nuts. I wish devices would just follow the spec, and accept up to the maximum capacity. But it seems like device manufacturers end up testing the biggest card when they make the device, and as time marches on, you have to search Amazon reviews to see which cards work and which devices have hardcoded smaller limits on capacity.

[+] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
> But it seems like device manufacturers end up testing the biggest card when they make the device

I mean, they can't test hardware that doesn't exist yet, so what is the alternative?

If there's a hardcoded maximum, that's one thing, but we don't know that's what is going on, do we?

[+] wvh|6 years ago|reply
But... Doesn't every MicroSDXC card support up to the maximum available addressing limit? If it supports a 64GB card, it should also support a 512GB card, though the manufacturer probably doesn't want to guarantee anything that doesn't exist yet.
[+] jsjohnst|6 years ago|reply
> MicroSDXC cards use the exFAT system by default. Windows has supported it for over a decade, but macOS only since version 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard).

Snow Leopard was released a decade ago[0], so seems like their choice of wording is indicating a bias there.

[0] 10.6.5 was released in Nov 2010 however per Wikipedia, so almost 9 years. Still feel my point remains.

[+] Zenst|6 years ago|reply
Worth adding that exFAT has aspects that Microsoft hold patents for. Yes they do license for a flat fee, though not aware Apple holds such a license. Also it wasn't until circa 2009 that the SDCARD collective adopted it as a standard. That and wasn't until 2013 that a GPL Linux driver was available.

So yes, very unfair to bash Apple about over this, you raise valid concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

[+] zamadatix|6 years ago|reply
> First, hardware that supports microSDXC slots won’t automatically support every size of card in this format. The Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, officially supports cards up to 400GB. There’s no guarantee that your 512GB card will work.

Does anyone have a real life anecdote of a device which supports a given version of the standard not be able to use a card of the same version larger than the device supports? I've yet to run into it and always considered it a misunderstanding from issues when newer versions of the standard came out with higher capacity being conflated with what the manufacturer was able to validate on release date but maybe I've just been lucky.

[+] vvvrrooomm|6 years ago|reply
Olympia NC560 Cash counter: can update to new bills from sd-card, the manual states "Micro-SD memory card with a capacity of 1GB up to 8GB".

We tried a 32GB card first, the update seamed to run fine. To finalize the update file is deleted from the sd-card. This all happened, then the device was stuck in firmware-update mode (undocumented state). Tried it again with a 4GB sd-card, update worked fine.

We assume the update file was spread beyond the 8GB boundary

[+] stefan_|6 years ago|reply
The article mistakenly says "microSDXC slots" when it means "microSD" slot. Because SD, SDHC and SDXC all have the same physical form factor and slot you put them into, but vastly different electrical interfaces and protocols.

And yes, older versions like SD literally did not have the bits to even communicate cards with 512 GiB.

[+] jbob2000|6 years ago|reply
Sure. The ecoboost Ford mustang. If you put the engine from a Mustang GT in the Ecoboost mustang, the crankshaft will explode. You can totally mount the engine from the GT in the ecoboost, it's the same frame, but the rest of the car is not engineered to support that much horsepower.
[+] alister|6 years ago|reply
> We’ve all owned flash memory cards that have stopped working for no apparent reason.

MicroSD cards and SSD drives use exactly the same technology (NAND flash memory), so it’s a mystery to me that microSD cards are unreliable, but SSD drives are extremely reliable. Genuine SanDisk cards have failed on me for no apparent reason, but I’ve never had a problem with SSD drives with much greater usage.

[+] alibert|6 years ago|reply
It's the controller and the reserved/backup flash. SSD have a powerful ARM CPU running and optimizing memory cell wear and replacing these on the fly with the reserve.

SD cards doesn't have that mostly for cost and size constraint.

[+] martin8412|6 years ago|reply
I must say that I have never had an SD card fail on me.

I use two in my primary camera that are setup for mirroring just in case. One in my pocket camera and one in a Raspberry PI. So maybe that's why I haven't experienced any failures. Don't know if model of card has any relevance, but I only buy the SanDisk Extreme Pro cards.

[+] poizan42|6 years ago|reply
The SD Card Association seems really short-sighted when it comes to capacity. Compare to the world of harddrive where ATA-6 introduced LBA48 which allows for capacities up to 128PiB all the way back in 2003, while SDUC introduced in 2018 is still limited to 128TiB.
[+] egdod|6 years ago|reply
What an absolute mess. I’m a technical nerd, and I can probably do the research necessary when I need a new card... but we expect ordinary people to figure it out? Not likely.
[+] la_barba|6 years ago|reply
Which part are you having trouble with? Seems very simple and straight forward to me. Your "ordinary people" comment doesn't mean much TBH. It is no different than buying a tire, you have your speed rating, section width, load index, maximum inflation pressure, wheel diameter, etc, etc. Wow.. so many crazy numbers !! How do "ordinary people" ever buy a tire.. :)
[+] forgot-my-pw|6 years ago|reply
I don't get why they can't reuse the speed class: Class 30, Class 60, Class 90.
[+] Razengan|6 years ago|reply
Reading about all this kind of shows why Apple must have decided not to include SD slots in their iDevices.
[+] tacotime|6 years ago|reply
I think a more likely reason is so that they can charge $150-200 for an internal storage upgrade of 200-250GB and push their iCloud service. This wouldn’t work so well for a manufacturer like Samsung who is not as differentiated from it’s competitors.
[+] neves|6 years ago|reply
I've had cards that I could fill with the designated size, but in speed tests would be slower than the manufacturer specification. Does anyone here also have these kind of problems?
[+] AnthonBerg|6 years ago|reply
My takeaway from the article is that SD cards are a mess information-wise and that I will continue to not buy or use them.
[+] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Something the article doesn't mention is that there are older SD readers with firmware limitations that drop their size limit even below the 2GB SD standard. An example of this is the reader built into the TC1100 tablet pc, which is limited to cards 1GB in size or less.
[+] eitland|6 years ago|reply
Any advice on where to get good cards for Raspberry Pi usage?

I mean it seems like most I have had wear out way in a few months even with next to no use.