I'm surprised at how hot the inside of the phone can get. I wouldn't be surprised if filming something in 4K or 120fps with the flash on and saving it to the SD card as you're going along generates more heat than the cards are capable of dealing with

Raspberry Pis used to deal badly with SD cards. Perhaps they still do.

It was thought that they overused them (one never used them for swap, but even logfiles were dangerous) or were too easily switched off mid-write. But Pis use a phone processor. Maybe there's some connection.

My first Raspberry Pi (ordered the day they were released) is still working fine with the same SD card (which is even older). It has no difficulty with log files and swap on the card. I used to have problems with defective SD cards, but I became more careful about where I purchased pre-Pi and have not had an SD card fail in a Pi or elsewhere since.

To be fair, I do not require my Pi's to thrash the swap partition and I repartition leaving a healthy chunk unassigned. Flash is made by Samsung, Toshiba and Micron. Do not buy from anyone else. Buy from as close to the manufacturer as you can. Buy from a distributor that specialises in electronics, preferably one you find on the list of authorised distributors you can find on the manufacturer's web site. Amazon (spit) have a common binning policy: cards sold by Samsung on Amazon were (years ago and perhaps still are) mixed into a bin with cards with the Samsung logo from other sources.

My first pi had issues but the SD was as cheap as I could find. So as the saying goes I bought twice. C10 Kingston were fine with Pi 1 so I stuck with them in my brace of 3s and a load of zeros. Kingston C10s weren't a problem as such in my Pi 4s but I gradually realised performance was underwhelming. So I RTFM (shocking I know) and yeah, C10 is way under spec for a 4 confirmed by the now baked in SD tester in Pi OS. Changing to U1 and going 64 bit utterly transformed it - it flies!

Thanks. I'll bear that in mind if my 4 is ever delivered.

I have a dozen or so first-gen Sony-built Pis at work, in constant (near 24/7) use playing videos since 2012. They were pretty awful at trashing cards in the early days, but the first batch of cards I bought (or rather, had bought for me) were what could be found at Tesco and Sainsbury's because of course putting the display together was a bit of a rush job.

It seemed mostly down to being powered-down mid-write, and often the cards could be recovered with fsck or whatever, and if not they could usually be reformatted even if that meant using the SD Card Association's official formatting tool. Powerdown during boot was almost guaranteed to trash the card and often in such circumstances the card was unrecoverable afterwards.

However, updates to the Pi's operating system have largely mitigated those problems, as has the use of genuine Sandisk, Samsung or Transcend cards, and I very rarely get a problem these days. I've subsequently bought quite a lot of Pi2, Pi3 and a couple of Pi4 and can honestly say that in the - let's call it nine years - since the first generation stopped mucking about I've had only two or three cards "just die" for no apparent reason.

As regards the problem in the smartphone, my suspicion would lie fair and square with Android I'm afraid. There is nothing intrinsic about a (good) SD card which makes it more fragile than any other removable storage medium as far as I can tell, I have SD cards in smartphones and non-smartphones, stills cameras, video recorders and mp3 players at home that have lasted years without issue.

M.

A micro sd card in my Raspberry Pi melted. I have no idea why.

I can visualise a modern version of The Four Yorkshiremen sketch based around the usage and woes of SD cards.

Personally, I swear by Ee-ba-gum brand, but keep away from that Ecky-Thump rubbish.

With absolutely no reason or evidence I have a nasty suspicion that this sort if thing is caused by some kind of copyright protection built in to the firmware or a media player's code. I may not have any reason, but I do have plenty of cynicism.

IIRC, France taxes storage devices to punish people who create their own content and to double charge those who purchase legitimate copies of copyright works. In theory the taxes are distributed among content creators so (in rainbow unicorn) France obtaining music from pirates does not harm the creators (who may well have harsh words for this theory). This type of copyright protection should be unnecessary in [1]France .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#European_Union_review

Were these tracks bought via some route that involved payment to Google? No?

Maybe it's related to this: if my phone is switched off or, as is more likely, the battery has run down because I haven't used it for several days, all the apps downloaded from F-Droid disappear from the main UI pages. They can be copied - or is it linked? - back from the alphabetical list of available apps but not immediately as they're also hidden from that for several minutes. It may be a bug, it may be a gentle hint from Google that they don't like it when I fail opt not to to give them some money. Cock-up or conspiracy, take your choice, the result's the same.

I also use F-Droid for all my apps, and I don't have any such problem. One contact manager won't seem to stick to the home screen where a previous one did, and that's the limit of it. (I switch off every night too.)

The logic has a bit of truthiness to it though. If many phone brands and many card manufacturers are affected then it must be Android itself that is shit.

I guess no "sideloaded" (ugh) apk on the SD card is readable until Android finds it or Play Protect gets round to okaying it, and a side effect it's removed from the menu because it's not readable.

By the way, Symbian could do this properly about two decades ago (Nokia 6600), but that's progress for you.

Shouldn't you be listen to all you music on Deezer, Mr Dabbs?

I refuse to stream music. It's worse than priacy: it steals money from artists and give it to some nobhead in charge of a company that has a bank of servers.

My daughters Huawei tablet used to eat MicroSD cards regularly. The card would be marked as defective somehow. There's a kill bit that makes the MicroSD card read-only so you can retrieve the existing files, but nothing I found can change it back to read-write.

I put this down to the fact that I had the tablet set to shutdown each night and restart in the morning to save battery. I thought that perhaps the card was not being unmounted before the OS shutdown. Unlikely I know, I turned off the scheduled task, same behavior. Cards lasted a week or a month, it was totally random.

BTW I discovered that SanDisks "lifetime" warranty involved submitted serial numbers etc. to an open ticket, before they ask you to ship the card back to the US!

I'm assuming they know no one will go through that faff. By the time I was asked to return the card, it had got lost somewhere in the house.

I have a Samsung phone and have had older Samsung, ZTE, and Nokia phones. I've been through about 7 microSD cards that have all randomly just stopped working. Alternately, I've got one card that is in its 3rd device...

My daughters Huawei tablet used to eat MicroSD cards regularly. The card would be marked as defective somehow. There's a kill bit that makes the MicroSD card read-only so you can retrieve the existing files, but nothing I found can change it back to read-write.

I put this down to the fact that I had the tablet set to shutdown each night and restart in the morning to save battery. I thought that perhaps the card was not being unmounted before the OS shutdown. Unlikely I know, I turned off the scheduled task, same behavior. Cards lasted a week or a month, it was totally random.

BTW I discovered that SanDisks "lifetime" warranty involved submitted serial numbers etc. to an open ticket, before they ask you to ship the card back to the US!

I'm assuming they know no one will go through that faff. By the time I was asked to return the card, it had got lost somewhere in the house.

I also discovered that Huawei tablets, like most other android slabs rarely get software updates to fix this stuff.

Obviously, the bits are being stolen by foreigners to supply their countries with enough bits . When bits are stolen they automatically return to zero on the SD card. It is just like NFTs; only one can own the bits , all other owners' are stripped.

The usual suspects were already mentioned in the article. They also engage in bits replacements and want more of your bits before they return your original bits . However, it has become easier just to steal the bits completely to supply their own demand.

That's ridiculous. What's happening is that foreigners are generating extra ones as waste by their one industry and so are dumping them in your phone. In the future kids will look out onto vast slagheaps of used oned

You won't see the 1 s as they sink in the bottom when washed through the sewers and rivers. The 0 s are those you see as they float on top. The pirates just skim the float and put them on your SD card.

No. Stop these conspiracy theories.

The problem is with the phones without accelerometer. If you tilt your phone, the heavy 1 are going all around the place in the SD card and 0 sometimes get damaged and split to form 11 which destroys encryption.

If you have an accelerometer, the phone can generate a magnetic field to create a cushion and counter the forces caused by tilting, so the 1 and 0 bump each other more gently.

You may also have bit sex when a collision occurs between a 1 and a 0 . Only when the angles are just right and have a gently cushioned collision you will get a penetration of the 1 through the 0 .

The outcome will be added bits in any of the combinations 0 0 , 0 1 , 1 1 or 1 0 . Procreation of storage bits with random organisation is the real encryption destroyer.

Are you making a joke about the Ls and Rs in Asian languages? Is there a band called "The Crash" I don't know about?? Or is proof reading a thing of the past here on Re Leg?

It very much surprised me but there is. Here is a link to an album of theirs.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5T63iqDmCk9rdyx9zUeWNj?si=2GApYqCbS5OEz_AAC60bSg

My fault: I made an old-fashioned joke about accents but forgot to warn the sub-editor. I'd written "The Crash" and "The Porice", and had Kim Jon-Un saying "Huh, more eighties clap". I find accents funny.

They really haven't - they've been created by bots inserting specific model names into generic pages of "turn it off and then on again" pseudo-advice with lots of space for adverts and dubious downloads. I've come to the conclusion there is absolutely no help available for mobile phone problems - especially from the manufacturers.

I've found that all SD cards in phones become corrupt over time and it seems to be a combination of the technology itself compounded by the use of FAT/exFAT. Now that most devices have moved over to MTP for USB access, there's really no reason any more why a more forgiving fie system couldn't be used. Android periodically does an fstrim for SD cards and unfortunately any duff report from the FAT and you could irretrievably discard most of your data.

So the tl;dr; here is that Android itself is shit, and habitually murders SD cards through bad software design that doesn't take into account the fact that the hardware may occasionally not report its status accurately? I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't also an element of the fact that the contacts on SD cards are small and presumably made against tiny spring-like contacts in the phone, which sound very much like something that would be prone to intermittent failure through dust sand, grease, vibration, and so on.

I personally don't think its the cards, I blame Android, I have 32GB no brand in my Chinese made in car CCTV ( can't beat the Chinese for surveillance ) that records from 3 cameras 2x1080 and 1x720 plus audio, now well in to it's 6th year of usage and these cameras can get toasty.

Have you ever tried to play it back? I have a really fast backup drive on my system mounted on /dev/null

Yes, the car was rear ended after about 3 years of recording, played back the footage on the camera to see what it caught, everything and then mounted it on my computer to upload to insurance company. So either I was lucky and got a good SD, or the Chinese make damn sure that the SD can read in any condition.

You say this may be a conspiracy from Xiaomi to do away with the SD card slot, but the mid-range Xiaomi phone I bought a year and a bit ago is one of the few around that has a slot for both an SD card AND dual SIM. It hasn't murdered any SD cards yet, in the way that my old HTC phone did.

SD cards are so simple (they are basically just a NAND chip on a PCB) that unless the card is properly dead you can assume the fault is in the host device (which is where the controller is).

What you are describing is a known bug with Android devices, occasionally the 'check the SD card is readable and warn the user if it is not' and the 'mount the sd card' processes run in the wrong order, so the mount process runs first.

The default behaviour when trying to mount a blank sd card is to format it and create a partition, but because it is running out of order it just gets stuck in a loop of continually wiping the sd card in the background.

You will have to ask Google why they think that wiping all data without asking the user is a sane default.

SD cards are so simple (they are basically just a NAND chip on a PCB)

While I know that was basically the case with xD cards, Smart Media and certain other early card formats, I'm pretty certain it's not the case with SD - all SD cards have a controller onboard which translates between the NAND and the interface, which is how larger sizes have been more easily accommodated than with the other formats:

[1]Wikipedia: memory card formats technical details

M.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_memory_cards#Technical_details

You will have to ask Google why they think that wiping all data without asking the user is a sane default.

They want you to use Google Drive, not those pesky SD cards that they cannot analyse with machine learning!

I'd blame Androids mistreating of SD cards. I've only had 1 micro SD card fail on me, despite the fact i have more than 20 in various devices.

I abused a micro SD card in my old windows phone for years without an issue. Once i swapped to an Android phone i had my first SD card failure with vanishing files.

I think the filesystem may have something to do with it too. Most the time people use them as FAT32 and it craps out fairly quickly. exFAT or F2FS seem to work much better as they seem to be made for flash devices rather than something that was designed before such devices even existed.

Then there's the people who use the wrong type of SD card for the job. Don't plonk a standard micro SD card in a dashcam, you'll kill it pretty quickly. Throw a high endurance card in and you won't have any problems (currently on my 4th year with a Sandisk high endurance with no issues).

Was going to say this myself, Android doesn't have a clearly defined standard for the format of SD cards so it's down to the OEM. My Nokia 6.1 doesn't support exFAT for example so I can't put large video files on the SD card. I suspect, as with most of the problems with Android, that fragmentation is the problem. If Google didn't leave so much up to the OEMs it would be a much better OS.

MicroSD as a format isn't the problem here, the problem is largely IMO down to the insatiable desire for scammers to flog remarked cards to gullible buyers, who then sooner or later see their superduper top of the range card fail, and start complaining that such and such a brand is a pile of crap, without stopping to wonder how it was their supplier was able to make a profit by selling the card to them for X, when other suppliers seemed unable to offer the "same" thing for anything less than at least 2X and often somewhat more. There's only so much cynicism you can apply when it comes to presuming that some suppliers are just trying to rip you off with stupidly high pricing, before you really do need to start wondering if there's a less agreeable reason why some suppliers can undercut by such huge margins....

I only ever buy cards from trusted suppliers, and each one is tested on delivery to ensure it's able to store and retrieve its stated capacity. Consequently, the total number of SD cards (normal, mini or micro) I've had fail once put into service in whichever device (phone, tablet, dashcam etc) they were bought for is currently holding steady at a big fat zero. The only times I've suffered data loss from genuine cards whilst being used normally was back in the bad old days of SmartMedia (oh, what an ironic name for such a dumb format), which were rather more fragile (both physically and at the storage format level) than any consumer-focussed storage media ought to have been. Not at all sorry to see the back of those damn things.

I've used Nokia phones until very recently. In getting on for 20 years of memory card use, I had one sd card failure in a Nokia, which I ascribed to the fact that I used a no-name brand instead of a major name. In the last 3 years, I've been using a Huawei, with Samsung memory cards and both have failed. I've bought from the same reliable source I've always used. The cards lose the ability to reformat, save or delete. I've used specialised software to reformat the card, but no dice. In these cases I have ascribed the fault to the phone, but whether software or hardware I have yet to find out

Once my SD cards fills up, I create an image and also copy the files themselves to a backup storage. Then SD card gets discarded.

It's too unreliable medium to trust it with pictures of my cats.

I think the issue is how much the card is written too.

As much as I understand the below is true. Happy to be corrected.

All SSD media has a finite amount of times a cell can be written too. More expensive cards for things like video seem to have more space for spare cells to replace as cells wear out.

I use microSD in cycle and car cameras as well as Raspberry Pis, and have had cheaper cards (decent brand but basic spec) go "bad" where I can't write or sometimes read them in a few months. video rated cards aren't that much more expensive but last a lot longer.

As for Android, it seems to write all sorts of crud to a card, even if you only attach to pull some data off, so I suspect it is constantly chatting and writing to a card. I've given up sticking my camera cards in Android.

I have found MicroSD cards to be very unreliable.

Oddly enough the full size ones don't seem to suffer from the same problems, even though they are supposedly the same technology.

For that reason, I now make a point of always buying the full size cards for my camera rather than the "MicroSD with a full size adaptor" sort.

Most readers especially the ones with a plastic housing, will at some point fail (like immediately ?), causing the write protect bit, of the reader, to be falsely asserted. The write protect mechanism is implemented in software. So you put your card in the device, the device says ts write protected, and that's that. You take the write protected card , you put it into a brand new reader, you format it with the SD card association utility, not the rufus and windows file manager crapware/bugware sd utlities, and the card suddenly works. Minus any data it had in it.

So now you think to yourself, did I just format this card for nothing ? Lets try the new reader without the formatting. And ... it works.

I even had a card that was as flagged as read only by its embedded microprocessor according to diagnostics utilities. A card that was unsealed 3 hours earlier. A card that was used twice to copy in total 3 files. Suddenly it is "write protected" from its internal ucontroller according to the diagnostic software. Enter a new sd card reader for the PC and the permanent internal read only flag is gone. Poof.

Conclusion, moral of the story.

Don't buy expansive sd card readers. You will throw them away soon enough. Don't buy dirt cheap ones either. You will throw them away immediately, packaging included. Don't use 3rd part software/bugware/crapware, like windows, rufus etc to format them. I understand that people will disagree, so if all else fails use sd association software to format the card. If your card goes dead don't throw it away, try with a new sd card reader. If you are so inclined get an stduino or an arduino (don't forget the coal to power it up, in the case of the later), and make your own reader. You can find the software online if you need it ready made.

One successful read operation will do the trick, to get the card working again.

And keep in mind that every time you slot the card into the reader you wear the reader down, the write protect pin which has absolutely nothing to do with the write protect plastic switch on the card housing.

The internet if full of people copying each others pages offering the same useless advice. Like use partition manager, diagnostic utils etc etc. You will need to do some digging to get your problem sorted.

You bought a Huawei device.

Problem solved.