San Francisco is destroying micro-sd-cards

[Guest bonesawmcl]

Hey,

I have a question about an incident that happened first a few weeks ago and happened again today.

I have a SF with TFT (GEN1) with kallt_kaffe's JJ RLS9 as ROM. I had a 16gig SD-card and made a EXT3 partition for use as additional ROM memory.

It worked perfectly for about a year. Everything was ok, till three weeks ago the SD-card suddenly went dead.

The ROM said, the card needed formatting, but I didn't want to loose all my data.

So I tried to make a backup with an external sd-card-reader, but the card wasn't even recognised by the reader (both under windows and linux).

By the end of the day I gave up and tried to format the sd-card with the phone, but it didn't work either. The sd-card is dead.

I thought it might be the crappy quality of the cheap-chinese-brand 16gig sd-card, but could it be, that the SF generated some overvoltage and fries the controller of the sd-card or something like this?

What could be the Reason for this behaviour?

I hope someone can help me with this question, because I'm out of ideas what to do. (And I don't want to waste another new SD-card, just to be fried by my phone again)

Jonathan

[Guest targetbsp]

I don't think you have a choice but to try another card to be able to decisively answer that. A single, poor brand, SD card failing after earlier misbehaving is still only 1 card failing and is insufficient to decide if its the phone or sd card at fault surely?

Edited November 21, 2011 by targetbsp

[Guest oxyg3n89]

You need "paragon partition manager" ;) i had this issue on samsung spica,about 4 times :D cheap sd card from ebay and intense use of ext2 partition caused this. Sd card does not die so easy,just delete partitions with paragon,then format to linux ext2/3,next step convert it back to fat32. And proper sd card reader helps formating too.

Sent from my ZTE-BLADE using Tapatalk

Edited November 21, 2011 by oxyg3n89

[Guest bonesawmcl]

@targetbsp: I tried the 2gig sd-card that came with the SF but strange things keep happening (such as demounting an instant remounting the sd-card without a reason and today it gave me the same error as with the 16gig one, but I was able to revive it...). That's why I posted today and asked that question.

@oxyg3n89: Thank's for the hint with the partitionmanager. I'll try it out, but windows didn't even recognize that there is a sd-card in the reader, so I don't think I can format it. I'll post the results of this try tomorrow or so.

[Guest Roph]

Using a 2nd partition as virtual internal storage via Link2SD or some other tool like that will massively increase the read/write cycles on the SD card. Flash memory only has a limited amount of r/w cycles before it wears out.

It happening on a dedicated smaller partition accelerates the problem. This may not be the only reason that it failed, but if you'd been using it for a year like this, it would definitely be a significant contribution.

Edited November 21, 2011 by Roph

[Guest bonesawmcl]

Using a 2nd partition as virtual internal storage via Link2SD or some other tool like that will massively increase the read/write cycles on the SD card. Flash memory only has a limited amount of r/w cycles before it wears out.

It happening on a dedicated smaller partition accelerates the problem. This may not be the only reason that it failed, but if you'd been using it for a year like this, it would definitely be a significant contribution.

Ok... that could be it, but I didn't change my apps that often. Is there another way, to install more apps than the ones fitting on the internal memory?

@oxyg3n89: I tried it with paragon... it is reconized at first and I can delete the partition, but afterwards I can not create a new one, nor can I test the disk. When I try to test the sectors paragon removes the sd-card from the list and gives an error. If I restart paragon the drive is back in the list, but the partition is back too. There's another strange thing: Paragon says the installed partition is 2gb big, but there was a 15gb and a 500mb partition on it before it went dead. So I think, what @Roph said might be the reason (or some other faulty things)

[Guest oxyg3n89]

I had my card dead many times, windows never recognize faulty partitions or mount it but Paragon always gave it back to life, just play with partitions, try delete partition then apply settings, try converting it to different file systems,hope you can recover it, it is usuall to fail or gives error after first try, be patient ;) did you put card in reader or using blade ?

Ok... that could be it, but I didn't change my apps that often. Is there another way, to install more apps than the ones fitting on the internal memory?

@oxyg3n89: I tried it with paragon... it is reconized at first and I can delete the partition, but afterwards I can not create a new one, nor can I test the disk. When I try to test the sectors paragon removes the sd-card from the list and gives an error. If I restart paragon the drive is back in the list, but the partition is back too. There's another strange thing: Paragon says the installed partition is 2gb big, but there was a 15gb and a 500mb partition on it before it went dead. So I think, what @Roph said might be the reason (or some other faulty things)

Edited November 22, 2011 by oxyg3n89

[Guest unrandomsam]

I had a PNY Class 10 go bad from just normal use (Sent it back got refund - 5 year warranty).

Cannot imagine its the blade breaking it though

Does android do the thing that Symbian used to ? (Where it locks the card with a password somehow)

Don't think it does.

Anyone know ?