About SD cards and their life span

Hello,
I wasn’t sure if this belonged in General or Aldershot. Since it’s to do with SD cards I decided on General.

Just last night I had a micro SD card (that I was using with my Pi) wear out and become read-only. I’m a bit surprised, because although I’d had the card about two years, I’d been using it as a spare and so only used it once in a long while. I have other SD cards that I’ve been using much more for longer than two years, and they still seem to be working properly, so I assume this one was just a dud.

Have you had SD cards wear out? How long did they last before they failed? Do different brands tend to be more reliable than others? In my case the one that failed was a Samsung. My other cards are Kingston and Transcend.

Good question. Hard to say. Pretty sure it’s mostly been failures rather than wearing out.

No name cards can fail if I so much as look at them funny. Kingston is hard to say because many are counterfeit.

SanDisk I’ve had a few DOA or within the first couple of minutes, but otherwise never had one fail.

Be very careful with card readers and Micro adapters. I’ve had both nuke cards instantly.

Be very careful with card readers and Micro adapters. I’ve had both nuke cards instantly.

Thanks for making me aware of this, I’ve got a cheap card reader (and micro adapter) that I’ve been using without thinking about it. Although I’ve been using it for so long, it’s probably safe enough.

My Samsung card was actually in my raspberry pi when it stopped working. I was installing updates in Linux, and then I got loads of error messages, and / was remounted read only. Then when I rebooted, the card was read only, but it took me a while to notice, because Linux seemed to be behaving normally – it looked like I was able to create & save files, but after rebooting they’d all have vanished.

With the size adapters you’d know straight off if it was bad. I had a couple that were instant permanent death for MicroSD cards. There is a wide spectrum for card readers. Instant death and kind of flaky ones need to go in the bin.

Well, your SD card could be worn out. There is also the possibility that there was some voltage instability like noise or sag while it was hard at work causing the corruption. I’ve had similar to what you described happen quite a few times. In most cases saving what I need then dumping a fresh image has worked. In a couple of cases it hasn’t.

Next thing is what size does the card report that it is? Not partition size etc, but card size? I’ve had a few die, becoming obstinately read only and their reported size has dropped. In one case down to about 13MB. I can’t say the ratio, but this issue has been caused by both bad cheap card readers, and voltage issues during card access. Because SD cards have their own little management microcontroller, it can be upset by power issues causing errors.

There are some card readers out there that are capable of low level formatting SD cards using SDFormatter (Windows only), but I don’t have one. Which ones can seems to be pretty random. It’s about the only way to get rid of a “write protected” SD card as far as I understand.

All I can really say is it’s a pain. It’s usually just easiest to save what you can and make a new install on a new SD card.

Thanks for making me aware of this, I’ve got a cheap card reader (and micro adapter) that I’ve been using without thinking about it.

I had an SD reader that looked like this one corrupt cards, and even corrupted them when only reading.

Not saying it was a Vivitar (I binned it), just saying it looked just like this.

Don’t use a card you don’t have a copy of with any new reader, and if you seem to experience weird things with a new reader then don’t be afraid to bin it…