Galaxy S3 - the sd card destroyer

jmpmjmpm · Feb 18, 2013

I always run h2testw on my cards to check they have genuine capacities. A few years back I bought a few 8gb cards from various online retailers including the likes of eBay and amazon marketplace and online stores. When tested most of the cards turned out to be either fake capacity or failed during a stress test. Now I only buy retail packaged branded cards from big name retailers like amazon (when sold directly by amazon or fulfilled by Amazon) or argos, etc (my SanDisk 64gb was half price when I bought it with my phone at argos) then I test the crap out of them before entrusting photos to them.

I can only recommend that anyone buys from well established retailers that have genuine supply chains and something to lose if they were found to be selling fakes. Then stress test the card, try to break it. If it does then you dodged the bullet. Date the card, (label it) and once it's a few years old bin it or give it a throw away use coz these things only last about a 100,000 write cycles anyway.

Most importantly though, if you value your photos, videos etc please backup. There are lots of free and low cost solutions for this. I personally learned the hard way and a hard drive crash cost me 1year of my son's "baby photos", the wife and I were gutted but never again. If every device I own blew up right this moment I wouldn't lose a shred of valuable data.

Remember if you don't have 3 copies of it, it doesn't exist, 1 copy always needs to be off site I. E. Online and preferably 2 copies online with different storage providers

Sorry if that's a bit of a lecture but if it saves just 1 persons irreplaceable data then it's worth the page space here

Sent from my ARHD S3

Slimboball · Feb 18, 2013

Following on from my post yesterday. I was reluctant to have a go at reformatting my card in the hope that I would be able to find a way to salvage my lost data. I was only going to try this as a last resort.

However, having put the card back in my phone I was astonished to see that I could access all the folders & data on the card this morning! I immediately did a full back up of the card as a precaution (including all the photo's I'd 'lost' from my jolly boys outing on Saturday!

I don't know how long the card will now last, but at least I know not to rely on it as the only source for storing important data.

arghness · Feb 18, 2013

jmpmjmpm said:
Never had a problem with any genuine SanDisk card in any device. Hundreds of cards in hundreds of devices over the years including semi-pro photography where obviously card reliability is critical. I strongly suspect that the majority of these reports are of cheapo ebay/amazon market etc cards.

Sent from my ARHD S3

That's great. I bought my 32GB Sandisk card from a bricks and mortar store, it broke after less than a month of very light use in the S3, I returned it to Sandisk directly who sent out another card that also broke within a month.

I don't expect Sandisk to be sending out fake cards, so I'm still suspecting issues with (some?) S3s with (some?) types of card.

FileFixer · Feb 18, 2013

FileFixer said:
I bought new sd/sim module from ebay and wait for delivery. At my previous state with sd card problem on sgs3, my card work on my pc but not work on sgs3. For this reason I suppose that sd/sim module does not work.
When new module has been come, I report you.

New SIM/SD module is placed into S3 but problem not dissapear. Same thing happened as before.
My card was purchased from local distributor who was deal only genuine SanDisk cards and acessories. That was eliminate any possibilities for non genuine or fake SanDisk card.
SD card work on laptop but not on S3. In my opinion it seems that is something else was happened. Maybe software problem, kernel or ROM...?!

jmpmjmpm · Feb 18, 2013

arghness said:
That's great. I bought my 32GB Sandisk card from a bricks and mortar store, it broke after less than a month of very light use in the S3, I returned it to Sandisk directly who sent out another card that also broke within a month.

I don't expect Sandisk to be sending out fake cards, so I'm still suspecting issues with (some?) S3s with (some?) types of card.

Well that's why I used the word "majority" not "all"

No doubt some people will have issues with any mass produced product but then your phone could be killing the cards if it is faulty. I very much doubt that the s3 has an inherent or even common fault that kills memory cards. 9/10 of these cases are most likely to be cheap/fake crappy cards from eBay etc.

Sent from my ARHD S3

allotrios · Feb 18, 2013

The majority of people in this thread have had original SanDisk cards fail.

I am not sure why anyone would assume the issue is mainly with fake cards. You must not have bothered reading more than a couple of posts here.

There is definitely a problem with s3 & SanDisk. In my case it took over 4 months to happen, all was perfect before. So I would strongly advise everyone to either dump SanDisk or back up every night if they store important data on the card.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

mustang2012 · Feb 20, 2013

I also had my 32 gb card was destroyed after about one year of use. Happened week ago while I was down loading the rom. Either one phone nor my notebook or my friends s3 recognize the card. It simply were dead... it was after market which I bought from ebay as well. Ordered genuine samsung 32gb card and hopefully wont have any issues. ..

Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda premium

jmpmjmpm · Feb 20, 2013

allotrios said:
The majority of people in this thread have had original SanDisk cards fail.

I am not sure why anyone would assume the issue is mainly with fake cards. You must not have bothered reading more than a couple of posts here.

There is definitely a problem with s3 & SanDisk. In my case it took over 4 months to happen, all was perfect before. So I would strongly advise everyone to either dump SanDisk or back up every night if they store important data on the card.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

With respect, where is the proof of this? How do you know that these people can be certain their card is genuine? Just because it says Sandisk on the card doesn't mean it is genuinely Sandisk. For what I know everyone here has a genuine card and the s3 is killing them, that's fine. Equally everyone may have fake cards and can't tell the difference, that's fine too. Maybe someone can explain exactly what damage is being done to the cards on a technical level but I bet no one can.
Perhaps people are using a hack to swap the internal memory and extsd around, or stupidly creating swap areas on their write cycle limited cards? How many completely stock never rooted s3's have this issue?

I will stick with my opinion until my s3 kills my GENUINE 64 gig Sandisk card (which will never happen)

Sent from my ARHD S3

Slimboball · Feb 20, 2013

jmpmjmpm said:
With respect, where is the proof of this? How do you know that these people can be certain their card is genuine? Just because it says Sandisk on the card doesn't mean it is genuinely Sandisk. For what I know everyone here has a genuine card and the s3 is killing them, that's fine. Equally everyone may have fake cards and can't tell the difference, that's fine too. Maybe someone can explain exactly what damage is being done to the cards on a technical level but I bet no one can.
Perhaps people are using a hack to swap the internal memory and extsd around, or stupidly creating swap areas on their write cycle limited cards? How many completely stock never rooted s3's have this issue?

I will stick with my opinion until my s3 kills my GENUINE 64 gig Sandisk card (which will never happen)

Sent from my ARHD S3

Well I certainly know my Sandisk Ultra 32GB MicroSD was genuine! It was bought from www.mymemory.co.uk, arrived in a sealed white Sandisk package. It is this card http://www.mymemory.co.uk/Micro-SDH...Android-Micro-SD-(SDHC)-Class-10-UHS-1-30MB_s

I mentioned in my previous posts that it seemed to have rectified its problem, well that's not exactly true, because I am now getting intermittent warnings and mount/unmout symbols in the notification area. So I'm sure it is going to die once and for all shortly.

Not as big a problem as I have fully backed it up whilst it still works. I'm just annoyed that I have to do this.

Orical · Feb 20, 2013

Slimboball said:
Well I certainly know my Sandisk Ultra 32GB MicroSD was genuine! It was bought from www.mymemory.co.uk, arrived in a sealed white Sandisk package. It is this card http://www.mymemory.co.uk/Micro-SDH...Android-Micro-SD-(SDHC)-Class-10-UHS-1-30MB_s

I mentioned in my previous posts that it seemed to have rectified its problem, well that's not exactly true, because I am now getting intermittent warnings and mount/unmout symbols in the notification area. So I'm sure it is going to die once and for all shortly.

Not as big a problem as I have fully backed it up whilst it still works. I'm just annoyed that I have to do this.

I did a little searching and a lot of what's reported on the subject is summed up in two of the most common issues. The first is a bent pin inside the device that causes the SD card to fail, the other aside from a poorly made SD card is software based corruption meaning the card is partitioned improperly or the software used corrupts the state of the memory.

Either way if its the only card that you had this problem with then its probably just a bad card, with the amount of cards put out by any company your gonna run across this more frequently in a higher compression card due to faults in manufacturing, I also read they are aware of the high volume of problems and if you contact them they will replace it if under a 90 day purchase for free and some companies after that if you pay shipping.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda premium

allotrios · Feb 20, 2013

jmpmjmpm said:
With respect, where is the proof of this? How do you know that these people can be certain their card is genuine? Just because it says Sandisk on the card doesn't mean it is genuinely Sandisk. For what I know everyone here has a genuine card and the s3 is killing them, that's fine. Equally everyone may have fake cards and can't tell the difference, that's fine too. Maybe someone can explain exactly what damage is being done to the cards on a technical level but I bet no one can.
Perhaps people are using a hack to swap the internal memory and extsd around, or stupidly creating swap areas on their write cycle limited cards? How many completely stock never rooted s3's have this issue?

I will stick with my opinion until my s3 kills my GENUINE 64 gig Sandisk card (which will never happen)

Sent from my ARHD S3

You have the right to ignore evidence, make incorrect assumptions about things you have no personal experience with and ultimately remain ignorant. I prefer to go with ocam's razor. If my device was genuine (it was) and I wasn't doing anything fancy with it (I wasn't) and it broke (it did break), there is nothing there pointing to fake cards with dodgy things running on them. But as I said, you have every right to be wrong.

On the technical note, my card has been sent to the recovery company suggested by SanDisk. They said the controller chip is completely unresponsive and cannot recover it. The card is absolutely 100% genuine as it has been authorised by SanDisk for rma and if you paid attention at all, many people have gone through the rma route here, something that would be impossible with a fake card.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

BrotherDave · Feb 20, 2013

I have a stock never rooted S3 and have had this problem. Transcend 32GB card bought from ebuyer and have just yesterday fell out with it again. The phone started to display the little memory card symbol in the notification area suggesting a format, took the card out of the phone inserted into a card reader and into my pc and shows blank/empty/corrupt whatever but nothing on it and asking to be formatted. This is the THIRD time this has happened now since buying the card back in August so that's it getting ditched now, don't know whether it's the card or the phone but will carefully consider a replacement.

jmpmjmpm · Feb 21, 2013

allotrios said:
You have the right to ignore evidence, make incorrect assumptions about things you have no personal experience with and ultimately remain ignorant. I prefer to go with ocam's razor. If my device was genuine (it was) and I wasn't doing anything fancy with it (I wasn't) and it broke (it did break), there is nothing there pointing to fake cards with dodgy things running on them. But as I said, you have every right to be wrong.

On the technical note, my card has been sent to the recovery company suggested by SanDisk. They said the controller chip is completely unresponsive and cannot recover it. The card is absolutely 100% genuine as it has been authorised by SanDisk for rma and if you paid attention at all, many people have gone through the rma route here, something that would be impossible with a fake card.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

You seem to have misunderstood. If you read my posts I never said that every card that fails is fake, just that the majority probably are. I am not questioning the fact that your card is genuine and you have experienced a bonafide failure. However, your card would have failed regardless of the device it was used in. You had a defective card, not a defective device. If your s3 killed your card why would Sandisk replace it under rma? If it makes you comfortable I will concede to being "wrong".

What I am saying simply is that I do not believe nor have seen any evidence that failure rates of cards are any higher in s3 than any other device. Also as an engineer working with "critical infrastructure" of a sophisticated electronic nature I have seen many times people's capacity to be down right stupid, even dishonest when reporting faults so most certainly won't be treating a few posts with no supporting evidence on a web forum as gospel!

You are entitled to be wrong in your assumption that your s3 killed your card yet you have no evidence whatsoever of this

That is my last thought on this subject. I wish you well with your s3 and your replacement memory card

Sent from my ARHD S3

Ashley1987 · Feb 21, 2013

Ive had my32gb sandisk one for well over a year now, just over a month in the s3. I think a lot of posts in here are just coincidence that their card have died in this phone.

clickityclack · Feb 21, 2013

I'm still using the same SanDisk card I used in my Blackberry beginning at least 2 or more years ago.....

rizzy123 · Feb 21, 2013

So finally which is the best card to buy if looking for a 64gb card and if possible the price too (in gbp)

Thanks

jmpmjmpm · Feb 21, 2013

rizzy123 said:
So finally which is the best card to buy if looking for a 64gb card and if possible the price too (in gbp)

Thanks

The only advice I can give is whatever card you buy do your best to make sure it's genuine. Don't be tempted by low price fakes (like so many here are then blame their device when it fails). Once you receive it check and test it until you are satisfied it's genuine brand and capacity (there is lots of info what to look for so search Google). If you do these things it is highly unlikely you will have any problems with your card in any device during its lifetime

Sent from my ARHD S3

allotrios · Feb 21, 2013

The problem is mainly with SanDisk 32gb class 10 cards. Most people have the problem with this particular type. SanDisk acknowledged there is an issue and claim to have fixed it but there is probably still stock of dodgy cards out there.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

adnan.makarevic · Feb 21, 2013

i had a the same problem with two sandisk 32gb class 10 cards, the first one get some random unmounts and mounts, and some time later it was unaccessable.. i get replace for it, but didnt have the time to wait two weeks and buy a new one, but the same card as before.. with this one, i had the same problem again, a lot of random unmounts and mounts.. if you search over google, you will find a lot of entries regarding sandisk 32gb class 10 card, it looks like the card and the device are not compatible for unknow reason.. the sandisk card work without any problems on my pc with a card reader, but in the phone sgs 3 lte, it has problems.. now, i order two days a go a transcend 32gb class 10 card and for now the problems are gone.. i really think there are some problems in combination with sgs 3 lte and the sandisk.

arghness · Feb 21, 2013

allotrios said:
The problem is mainly with SanDisk 32gb class 10 cards. Most people have the problem with this particular type. SanDisk acknowledged there is an issue and claim to have fixed it but there is probably still stock of dodgy cards out there.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

Do you have a link to where they acknowledge the issue and claim to have fixed it, please?

Galaxy S3 - the sd card destroyer

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Similar threads

Top Liked Posts