Linux SD Card Failure

merlin

All-Pro
Location
Northern New Mexico
Name
Merlin Emrys
For the first time since entering the digital format in April 2009, an SD card has failed. It is a Sandisk Extreme Pro 32 GB SDHC UHS-II.

When I inserted it in the card reader, none of the files were useable. The error messages indicate that the file info had been truncated.

I re-formatted the card in the camera and took some photographs. Everything seemed fine, but when I inserted the card in the reader, it came up blank. After huge anxiety that it was the camera and not the card, inserting a different one worked perfectly.
 
I have had a problem with a couple of 32gb cards which died on me in my GR2. I can do nothing with them. Neither the camera nor my laptop see them. Frustrating!
 
I have had a problem with a couple of 32gb cards which died on me in my GR2. I can do nothing with them. Neither the camera nor my laptop see them. Frustrating!

Interestingly, the card comes up on the computer (USB cable, two card readers) but there is nothing on it, not even the usual directories. And the camera is set up to only take photographs when a card is present, but there were no error messages.
 
Thanks for the advice, Bobby! Much appreciated. But those UHS-II cards are not cheap! Less than a few years ago, but the 32G replacement was close to $60.
I never use cards that fast. No need for it, unless your doing 4k video work. I use the sandisk extreme pro cards that are 95mbs. Those are faster than I need and $20 each.
 
Thom Hogan has an interesting observation on NAND life in memory cards:

The Card Failure Issue | Sans Mirror | Thom Hogan

t's been pointed out to me that NAND does age (limited number of reads/writes), and this will eventually produce failure. That's true of all storage cards consumers can buy. I probably should note that I regularly retire my cards. It's probably one reason why I don't generally experience these types of card failure issues, even on SD or CF. People need to start thinking of cards like they think of tires on their autos: they have a limited read/write life span and should be replaced with some regularity if you care about data integrity. SD, in particular, is particularly prone to this problem because it's been around for so long. I keep encountering people who are still using their original SD card in their latest camera. Not only is that card slower than the camera can manage, but if you've been shooting long enough, you're going to hit cell degradation.

As for myself, my SD card failures fall into the physical structure failure Thom talks about in the article. Two have died because of structural rib failures - the plastic shroud started to flake off near the pins, and one had a completely loose R/W tab.

I'll be asking for Tough Cards for the holidays.

Sony says this new SD card is the world's toughest
 
Thanks for the advice! I use the 95 mbs cards in my X30, but thought the faster ones improved the response and write times of the X-T's.
I never shoot in any of the burst modes, so I can’t say at which card speed a difference will be noticed in write times and clearing the buffer. The six months I worked with a X-T2 w/battery grip. I used the same same cards that used in my Pro2. There was no difference in performance for me. But I am not a fast shooter.

I can say that I did notice a performance difference using a sandisk ultra card which is 80mbs. That was noticeably slow, even for me.

@Covey22 those tough cards have my interest. The one thing I hated when switching to mirrorless was giving up CF cards.
 
I remember the first time I had one fail....I was IRATE. How could they make some media that would fail like that? Now I buy more and smaller cards. I think they are less likely to fail that way...and when they do, you lose less.

I kinda liken them to cassette tapes from the old days. If I'm making a recording I treasure, I'll bust out a new one.
 
I remember having issues with various cards when I was using m4/3 and it turned out to be worn out contacts. So I thought of an easy fix, using the microSD card and an adapter and replace the worn out adapter because it's very cheap. But that solution failed (unstable no matter what adapter) when I switched to fuji, somehow my X-E3 loves full size SD cards, even those failed to work with previous cameras.
 
If there is anything on the card that you need to get, give "recuva" a shot at it.

Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free!

If the computer mounts the card, Recuva should be able to do a file analysis even if the format is not recognized by the computer.

I stick with 8GByte SD cards, mostly 4x speed for reliability and lower noise.

Also due to this experience:
Rangefinderforum.com Portal - News - Sandisk 8GByte Extreme Pro: will not work with my EP-2, CX-1, or WIN7 machine.

I've never bought another Sandisk high speed card since.
 
I'm running this on Win7, 64-bit.

The free version of this software was so good that I bought two licenses for the "upgraded version". The other product that I looked at was $3500. This software negated the need to buy that package, and cost me $36 for both licenses. The $3500 software- the sales reps could not be bothered to return a reply when I requested a quote- twice. I found the price indirectly, and had the funds to purchase it. They lost a sale. I used to write my own physical layer device drivers for VMS that recovered lost files. I thought about it.
 
SanDisk bundles recovery software (or used to) with their cards. Lexar did the same. Generally speaking, they work just fine if you immediately stop using the card after you discover the flaw and not write further to it.
 
SanDisk bundles recovery software (or used to) with their cards. Lexar did the same. Generally speaking, they work just fine if you immediately stop using the card after you discover the flaw and not write further to it.
I was going to send him an activation code for one of those, but I don’t think that they run in Linux.
 
I tried the utilities that came with the Sandisk card: they were completely useless. If it ever happens again, i would give them and Recuva a try.

I used Xenix on an 80286 computer 30+ years ago, an Intel Sugarcube with four nodes each with 20MFlop SKY array processors on them. You had to balance the load on the nodes and vectorization yourself. My last experience with anything Unix related.
 
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