Am I over-using my Micro SD cards, and are they covered under warranty?

[Xanthe_2871]

Hi. I use micro SD cards a lot. SanDisk ones, Samsung ones, Kingston, PNY, you name it. SanDisk is the brand I buy most. I've noticed my cards seem to die on me a lot, and I'm wondering if I'm using them too much. For one example I have my dash cam in my car. It's currently a Moto Z2 Force with a SanDisk 128 GB Micro SD card. I fill the card to capacity each day, and the phone uploads the recorded video to my Google Photos account at almost live speed. By the end of the day it's nearly all caught up and within an hour it's all uploaded, so I delete all the clips off the card and repeat the next day. That's a full write cycle of the entire card's capacity every day. It seems the card fails pretty often. In the last year I've gone through at least 4 cards, just for this particular situation. Is this to be expected? Am I just using them too hard? I've also had multiple GoPro Micro SD cards die on me, and a few in my phone phones (that is to say, the phones I use like a smartphone is intended, not as a dashcam or other bizarre use case).

 

So far I've had Amazon replace them twice at their cost, and twice I've bought replacements myself. SanDisk has a "10 year limited warranty", does that cover very heavy use? If it does, will they just keep replacing cards? I can't imagine on my 10th RMA for the same card they'd still cover it under the warranty...

 

So many questions, I'm hoping someone here has some answers. Thanks guys!

[kelvinhall05]

My question is how you fill up a 128GB SD card in a SINGLE DAY...

[R3ep3r]

Just now, kelvinhall05 said:

My question is how you fill up a 128GB SD card in a SINGLE DAY...

I bet he drives a lot LOL

[Xanthe_2871]

18 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

My question is how you fill up a 128GB SD card in a SINGLE DAY...

1080p video, set to record in 1 GB clips, I get 7-8 minutes per GB.

[TechyBen]

Why are you keeping all the videos? Dash cam can have a "save last X time" feature.

 

Yes, use can shorten life span. 2 things. Dashcam? What temps in the car? Extreme low or high can cause problems. Righting 128gb per day will cause problems. However, PNY gives a 5 year 10,000 cycles, so you should not be hitting that yet.

 

If they give the warranty, then use it. However, have you tried just reformatting the card with SDcard formatters (windows may fail, so you need special software)?

 

It may be that the DashCam is just loosing power at some point and corrupting the SDcard file format, not the entire card.

 

PS, what dashcam is it? If using a Phone, it sounds like you are getting Android file format errors, not SD-Card errors. Do you have a PC SD card usb reader? Direct file transfer from phone probably will not allow file/format repair or recovery.

[Xanthe_2871]

1 minute ago, TechyBen said:

Why are you keeping all the videos? Dash cam can have a "save last X time" feature.

 

Yes, use can shorten life span. 2 things. Dashcam? What temps in the car? Extreme low or high can cause problems. Righting 128gb per day will cause problems. However, PNY gives a 5 year 10,000 cycles, so you should not be hitting that yet.

 

If they give the warranty, then use it. However, have you tried just reformatting the card with SDcard formatters (windows may fail, so you need special software)?

 

It may be that the DashCam is just loosing power at some point and corrupting the SDcard file format, not the entire card.

I'll address these in order. I said I'm using a phone as a dashcam. It saves everything, not just impacts or flags. Every clip gets uploaded and archived in my google photos. Why? Mostly because I can. Google photos in unlimited. My cellular plan is unlimited. And I don't like to delete stuff if I don't have to. 

 

So far I haven't had a PNY fail. I don't trust them enough to use in anything important. But I will keep that policy in mind.

 

I have tried that. Usually when they fail computers and phones will still see them as storage, but unformatted or formatted but when I try to write to them files disappear. Reformats either don't work or don't solve the problem. I also get situations where everything is there and I can read from the card, but I can't write reliably and attempts to copy everything off the card fail mid way, even though I can open up any individual file without issues.

 

No, the app (Open Camera) automatically stops recording when the battery gets too low. Overheating does happen sometimes, but I've had cards die without ever getting significantly hot. 

 

This hasn't been too important so far because Micro SD cards have gotten fairly cheap. Whenever they'd have a big sale on Amazon I'd buy up a bunch, knowing they'd all fail. It's not just my dashcam. My GoPros, my phones, my tablets, even my 3DS, it seems almost every Micro SD that I haven't lost dies within a year or two. But now I'm considering buying a 400 GB Micro SD card. That would be sweet, but at +$200 it's a big investment, and very expensive per GB compared to a $40 128 GB card. But none of my phones have multiple micro SD card slots, so a single massive card would be nice. But I'm not going to spend 200 something dollars on a card that's going to fail 4 months later. Especially if I'm not covered under warranty. 

[Xanthe_2871]

22 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

PS, what dashcam is it? If using a Phone, it sounds like you are getting Android file format errors, not SD-Card errors. Do you have a PC SD card usb reader? Direct file transfer from phone probably will not allow file/format repair or recovery.

I don't think so. Reformats on the phone or a computer don't fix them.

[TechyBen]

Sometimes the stand alone SD card formatter will help. HP do one on their website, or here: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

Where do you live (country/state)? What are the temps outside?