Phone is frying SD cards

[Guest doogsville]

Hi. I have a Chinese Blade, cos I live in China. I've had it since October last year, and I got a no name 4g micro SD card with it from the shop I bought it in. The card failed after about a month, so I took it back to the shop and they replaced it with another no name card. That one went belly up about a month to six weeks ago, so rather than have it replaced again, which could have been problematic, since you only get about a three month warranty on things here, I bought a Kingston card, or at least I think it was a Kingston, it's hard to tell what’s real and what’s a copy out here. Now that one has died too. I'm going to take it back tomorrow to have it replaced. The thing is I'm not convinced it's the cards, I'm wondering if the phone is frying them somehow. If that's the case I'll have to flash the original ROM back on, since I've tried many different ones (I don't think the ROM is the problem though).

So I wondered if anyone else has had any similar experience. I know a friend of mine who bought a blade from the same company as me has had one card fail, but not three like me. Is it likely to be the phone, or have I just been really unlucky in my choice of SD cards?

[Guest Maxsas360]

Hi. I have a Chinese Blade, cos I live in China. I've had it since October last year, and I got a no name 4g micro SD card with it from the shop I bought it in. The card failed after about a month, so I took it back to the shop and they replaced it with another no name card. That one went belly up about a month to six weeks ago, so rather than have it replaced again, which could have been problematic, since you only get about a three month warranty on things here, I bought a Kingston card, or at least I think it was a Kingston, it's hard to tell what’s real and what’s a copy out here. Now that one has died too. I'm going to take it back tomorrow to have it replaced. The thing is I'm not convinced it's the cards, I'm wondering if the phone is frying them somehow. If that's the case I'll have to flash the original ROM back on, since I've tried many different ones (I don't think the ROM is the problem though).

So I wondered if anyone else has had any similar experience. I know a friend of mine who bought a blade from the same company as me has had one card fail, but not three like me. Is it likely to be the phone, or have I just been really unlucky in my choice of SD cards?

KFC - Kentucky Fried cards. This could be caused by a rom or a hardware failure. Try to flash another rom and later wipe sdcard contacts with rubbing or disinfecting alcohol. You can use vodka too, but it must be without any flavours.

[Guest hedgepigdaniel]

If it is the phone that is doing it then I doubt the ROM is the problem since it should be impossible for software to physically break the SD card.

[Guest doogsville]

If it is the phone that is doing it then I doubt the ROM is the problem since it should be impossible for software to physically break the SD card.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's killed cards while running CM7, Ginger Stir Fry and Lewa ROMs, so it's likely to be either a problem with the phone, or I've just been unlucky with cards. I wondered if any one else had exprienced more than one card failing in a phone. It's a pain because if I have to take the phone back then I'll have to put a stock ROM back on.

[Guest Snaku]

Just to be sure with fried you mean it's dead real dead not even windows or linux will recognize the card? Because I've read stories on Modaco about cards getting damaged or corrupted, there is still a chance to repair it on your own. Also do you know of the cards from the store are new? This is really important since if they are used card they might have been used a ram swap, which reduce its life drastically.

All electronics are (oddly enough) at greatest risk of failing when new.

But the risk isn't that great, and cards should last for many years (unless you try and use them as though they were ram - like a swap partition - where they get intensive re-write usage).

They may be a time-bomb, but the fuse should be very long indeed.

Can you tell us more about how you partitioned the sd cards, just 1 big partition on fat32 or are you using more than 1 partition like also ext2, ext3, ext4?

I found 2 very helpful threads on Modaco, hope it can help you in a way.

http://android.modac...card-destroyed/

http://android.modac...estore-sd-card/

[Guest doogsville]

Hi Snaku, thanks for the info, seems dead SD cards are more common than they probably should be on the Blade. To answer your questions, the cards have died with different partition combinations. The first one had just one big fat32, then the second one I had a fat32, Linux swap file and an ext4 partition on it. The third one was back to just fat32. The first one wouldn’t mount in the blade, but the pc could see it and copy the files off it, but couldn't format it. The other two have been completely dead and not recognised by either the phone or the pc. The only thing all three cards had in common was the blade, they had different ROMs and partition types, so I'm thinking it's the phone.

The only thing that stops me taking it back right now is that I didn't back up the stock ROM before I put CM7 on it the first time, and Clockworkmod won't install the stock ROM I downloaded from the net. Anyway, I'm taking the dead SD card back for a replacement today, so I'll take weekly backups of the new card, and if it fails again I'll definitely take the phone back to the shop.

[Guest hecatae]

Fat32? You tried fat16 also known as fat.

[Guest swukjay]

if your using apps2sd and other ext partitions on the sd card the phone will be reading and writing constantly to the sdcard meaning it will kill it much sooner! This can usually be detected by missing widgets and icons etc, there aint much one can do except buy a high quality genuine sdcard im afraid.

[Guest damiensturdy]

Hmm, I'm on my third since I got the phone in May 2011.

doubt that using EXT2 would cause considerably lower lifespan- (Well, it does, but the internal storage in our phone is of the same technology so if it's breaking SDcards, it'd be breaking the phone too if you stopped using an ext2 partition.)

I'm wondering. Has anyone tested the voltages fed to the card?

[Guest eLJay]

I had issues with my 32gb SD card. I found that it was coming up as 32gb RAW. I also had a hard drive come up the same.

Windows 7 wouldn't do anything with it at all, it will only NTFS or ext2 them and then they still come up as RAW so cannot be touched.

I popped it on Ubuntu, it read, so I backed up the files by just copying them to the laptop then loaded gpart and deleted the old partitions and created new FAT 32 partitions before loading the data back on. Problem solved for me.