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Help Samsung Galaxy S3 KILLS SD CARDS!!!!!!

I got a Samsung Galaxy Note II and it have killed 3 sd-cards.
I was outside jumping on my trampoline, and I got my phone safely in my pocket. After a couple of minutes i walk inside and i see the notification that my SD-card har been unmounted. I try to re-mount it, re-start my phone, and try to read the card from a computer, but none helped. I thought it must be an error with this specific card, so i tried another card, and it worked for two weeks, and the new card died randomly. I cant remember but I think it was during the night when it was charging. Re-mount, re-start and checking from the computer proves it to be dead. And then I tried a third card. and it took only like two days before it had killed this card aswell...

I don't have any solutions, just extra information some of you could use to something productive! :)

It's a safe assumption there is something wrong with the Note II. I suggest you approach the seller asking for an exchange. It certainly shouldn't have seen the failure of 3 cards so quickly.
 
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Killed 2 of my cards also. Funny how we trust, isn't it? I feel like two years of my life have been stolen - the phone will not link up with my applemac so no back ups. Signal limit too low to upload . Am now stuck with a phone which has some photos and ...I need to take out the Sd card, don"t I, right now!
>>>>!!!!
 
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I have used 4 SD Cards in my S3 SPH-L710 over the last year. All 4 still work. I just keep upgrading. Finally on a 64GB now with no problems. I don't know why some folks have had this problem.

From a purely speculative viewpoint, I think it may have to do with poorly designed connectors for the micro USB cards. I've had some phones and a tablet in which the cards seemed to work themselves loose. I think if the phone or tablet happens to be accessing the card at the instant of lost connection it ruins the card. Or, it could just be that some percentage of microSD cards have borderline acceptable operation, and they are failing for some buyers. The circuits are extremely tiny. There has to be some percentage of error when they are built, and if they do not test every single card produced there may be some getting out that are time bombs waiting to die. I do know this. If any of them are, they will most definitely find their way to my house! :D I always seem to get the one broken item off a shelf full of them.
 
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I don't understand the issues some people have with the SD card dying in their Galaxy S3. I guess I have been incredibly lucky so far. I have had my S3 since the day they went on sale and have been using the same 64 GB card with absolutely no problem. I have recently switched to a 128 GB card also running without problem for about a month so far. I have other small issues with the phone, just not that issue. I may keep my S3 until the Galaxy S6 depending on how the Note 4 looks.
Hi - I have just begun thinking about getting a 128 GB card. May I ask exactly which Brand/model you have?
 
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I joined this forum because of this exact thread!

My SGS3 killed my sd card. One day I went to take a picture and got the yellow triangle, saying SD card unmounted. I lost all my photos. Like it was posted earlier I tried the recoverfab guy and got all of my pictures back. I'll never buy another Kingston card again.... Just wanted everyone to know it is possible to recover even if you think all is lost.
 
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I joined this forum because of this exact thread!

My SGS3 killed my sd card. One day I went to take a picture and got the yellow triangle, saying SD card unmounted. I lost all my photos. Like it was posted earlier I tried the recoverfab guy and got all of my pictures back. I'll never buy another Kingston card again.... Just wanted everyone to know it is possible to recover even if you think all is lost.

Congratulations on your successful file recovery! :) I recommend making regular backups of SD cards because of how easily this can happen.

How much does the recoverfab process cost?
 
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Couple hundred bucks. I tried recovery SW but the actual SD HW controller was toast. The physical memory was intact... No pc or HW would power it up. Tried windows, MAC, and my Linux box. Never any HW detected. I had backups, but lost the pictures of the trip I was on. Got them all back. Expensive but to me was worth it...
 
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Okay,
So I had a PNY class 10 for less than a year in my evo 4g, worked flawlessly. Bought a Sprint Siii, formatted my PNY and used it fine for a few months then all of a sudden one day my phone said I had a blank or unsupported SD card and that I had to format it. Of course I lost all my pictures and such. I tried all the programs to recover, tried adapters on the computer, I followed all the suggestions. Then gave up and tried to format it, that didn't even work, seeing that I could not format it... Hey I just thought according to all the smart people (sarcasm) online it must be dead, even though I never had an SD card die on me in any of my other 50 devices that used various SD cards.

So I just felt horrible for buying a budget SD card PNY, I didn't think was that bad, but now knew it was trash since it just died on me less than a year, and back when the EVO was out class 10 16 gig was expensive that was almost 4 years ago.

This time I thought I was not going to skimp on the card, I went straight for SanDisk Ultra 32 GB MicroSDHC Class 10 UHS-1 from Amazon even made sure according to those wonderful lemmings online on posts about this, it was an official SanDisk SD card that I had to cut open.

So Got my new card everything was peachy keen for about a month, and please get the wonderful irony in this, last Friday I bought my mom an Siii from Sprint because they were having a sale for them for $50. I thought to myself I had to upgrade her crappy SD card and I ordered her the same card...It comes I install it in her new Siii and less than an hour later the SD card in my phone says either SD card removed. Insert a new one. or SD card is blank or has unsupported files. So it appears my Siii struck again... I immediately took the SD card out of my mom's phone and told her its better to use the internal storage. Of course all my pictures and things are gone. Over 400 pictures! back up back up you say... okay I have after my last lesson most of them are on my dropbox but still not all of them. YET THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN TWICE IN A ROW. I refuse to just believe that "SD cards just die" I call BS maybe once in a while but not like this.

I think there is a problem with this phone and Samsung will never admit it since they sold over 30 million phones and are the envy of Apple, but I was hoping that someone on here could prove it, figure out how to fix the SD cards to recover the information or prevent this, and or take some kind of poll to see how common this is with the Siii I have a feeling this is a known issue to someone/I will not be buying another sd card to use with a phone again. This experience is abhorrent.


I've found this youtube video youtube.com/watch?v=1fjNkQkQZ2U




Update*
So I wanted another SD card my phone space is full. I bought an Amazon basics class 4 8GB 1 week later its fried. Thanks Samdung. I'm probably not using you again.
My 2 2100mah batteries have been wearing out, so I was blaming them when my Samsung Galaxy S3 starting heating up. I switched batteries and had the same thing happen. My Sprint store tech showed me that it was my SD card that was hot and it even had a yellow heat mark on it. He said my 32g card was not the correct one. i have it out now whiled waiting for my newSanDisc cards. It is not heating up now.
 
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Couple hundred bucks. I tried recovery SW but the actual SD HW controller was toast. The physical memory was intact... No pc or HW would power it up. Tried windows, MAC, and my Linux box. Never any HW detected. I had backups, but lost the pictures of the trip I was on. Got them all back. Expensive but to me was worth it...

I'm glad you got the pics back. Nice to know such a thing is possible when in a bind. :)
 
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My 2 2100mah batteries have been wearing out, so I was blaming them when my Samsung Galaxy S3 starting heating up. I switched batteries and had the same thing happen. My Sprint store tech showed me that it was my SD card that was hot and it even had a yellow heat mark on it. He said my 32g card was not the correct one. i have it out now whiled waiting for my newSanDisc cards. It is not heating up now.

Wow. I've never heard of an SD card heating up. That is really strange! Exactly which card did this happen with?

Edit - looks like it might not matter which card. I googled 'sd card overheating' Holy crap! The net is full of stories. I even saw one covered by Maximum PC. And the majority of what I found were stories about Samsung products. Not just smartphones either. Other products that us SD cards.
 
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My S3 has been without an SD card for about a year now.
in the first year (just coming to end of 2nd year) it fried TWO SD cards,
the first was an HC (?) or the faster type.....fried with LOADS of my
family photos on it (didn't back-up...doh !)
SO....I tried to be clever and thought "AH, I'll just use a 'normal' speed
one in case the High Speed one was drawing/being supplied too much
'current' ?!?
BUT, same thing happened to second card after a couple of months,
LUCKILY I'd started saving important stuff (Family shots etc) to PHONE
and used card for apps/download stuff etc.

I'm just about to get new phone and have narrowed it down to Note 3
or S5.........????????????????????????????
HELPPPP ! ! ! !
Are they liable to do the same ??????
FatS.:(
 
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In my case, I honestly just think my SD card slot is dead. It started randomly unmounting my card and eventually it just stopped reading cards entirely. And no, the two different cards I used (two different brands, to boot) didn't fry. One is working nicely in my TF201 right now and the other is sitting in its case awaiting some other use.

Doesn't seem to read in recovery either, which makes me think that in my case, it's the slot itself. Anyone else have this happen?
 
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Okay, update here... On a whim, decided to throw my SD card back into my phone. Rebooted into recovery and...recovery read the card just fine. But when I tried to get it to reboot from recovery, the phone just froze on rebooting. Er...now I'm confused.

Are you using Philz recovery? If not, i recommend flashing it.
 
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hi, I got the same problem. One day my phone decided, that SD card is empty, in few hours card was "full" again. But after that battery was out very quickly. I had charge my phone 2 times per day. In about 40 min listening to radio battery used about 20%. from 6am to 1 pm, battery was about 20% life. SO I took out my card and battery working again normally. Card is still OK, if you want to connect it to PC and all data is there. Card is SanDisk 16 gb
 
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I have a G.Skill 32GB microSDHC card I got last year for my Samsung Centura. I then got this S3 and swapped the card over to it. Still zero issues. Now I'm not saying that this isn't a real problem at all. Too many people have posted in this forum, alone, about having an issue. I just wonder what the cause is.

I'm on a Straight Talk SCH S960L. I've only rooted it. It runs 4.1.2 and Straight Talk didn't do any updates. It runs on the Sprint network and gets 4G LTE, etc. I've had a case on it since I got it and actually don't recall ever taking the SD card out one single time since I've had it. I've used it a decent amount, via the normal stuff, saving pics and video to it, using torrent apps, moving big files to/from PC, benchmarked it a lot with A1 SD bench, and primarily use it whenever android dictates I can save to it.

Physically, I've jogged with it, I have a GSX-R I ride with it in my pocket, and I ride spirited at times. I've sat in my truck in parking lots with the sun blaring in, downloading big files to my card off of free wifi when my home internet is off from me going over the bandwidth cap... 4G hotspot fyi..., while using the charger and hit that 120F max temp for charging warning a decent amount of times. And then there are the drops. I've dropped it a few times. Not many.

I feel like I'm sitting here waiting for it to go bad on me, in a way. On the other hand, I feel like if it's made it this far, I may just be ok.

Did I just jinx myself?
 
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I have a G.Skill 32GB microSDHC card I got last year for my Samsung Centura. I then got this S3 and swapped the card over to it. Still zero issues. Now I'm not saying that this isn't a real problem at all. Too many people have posted in this forum, alone, about having an issue. I just wonder what the cause is.

I'm on a Straight Talk SCH S960L. I've only rooted it. It runs 4.1.2 and Straight Talk didn't do any updates. It runs on the Sprint network and gets 4G LTE, etc. I've had a case on it since I got it and actually don't recall ever taking the SD card out one single time since I've had it. I've used it a decent amount, via the normal stuff, saving pics and video to it, using torrent apps, moving big files to/from PC, benchmarked it a lot with A1 SD bench, and primarily use it whenever android dictates I can save to it.

Physically, I've jogged with it, I have a GSX-R I ride with it in my pocket, and I ride spirited at times. I've sat in my truck in parking lots with the sun blaring in, downloading big files to my card off of free wifi when my home internet is off from me going over the bandwidth cap... 4G hotspot fyi..., while using the charger and hit that 120F max temp for charging warning a decent amount of times. And then there are the drops. I've dropped it a few times. Not many.

I feel like I'm sitting here waiting for it to go bad on me, in a way. On the other hand, I feel like if it's made it this far, I may just be ok.

Did I just jinx myself?

I wouldn't worry about it. I ride a Harley with my phone not to mention the other jolts it takes from everday use. If the phone hasn't caused it to go bad by now then i doubt it will. If your card goes bad it will probably do so due to old age lol. :D:thumbup:
 
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So, if the SD is no longer reading the files what are the steps to follow?

My phone still reads the SD card, and shows up as holding the relevant storage on the SD card when checking through the settings.

So once I get home im hoping when I phug into laptop that I'll be able to see all my photos and handful of videos? If this is the case is it as simple as copying over the files to my laptop and formatting my SD card.

Is there any other way to back up the files or is this the simplest way?

Edit --> I have just checked through 'My files' option and the files are showing up through this way under the 'storage/extsdcard/dcim folder.

any idea why the apps on sd are not working and file do not show through the gallery?
 
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So, if the SD is no longer reading the files what are the steps to follow?

My phone still reads the SD card, and shows up as holding the relevant storage on the SD card when checking through the settings.

So once I get home im hoping when I phug into laptop that I'll be able to see all my photos and handful of videos? If this is the case is it as simple as copying over the files to my laptop and formatting my SD card.

Is there any other way to back up the files or is this the simplest way?

Edit --> I have just checked through 'My files' option and the files are showing up through this way under the 'storage/extsdcard/dcim folder.

any idea why the apps on sd are not working and file do not show through the gallery?

I don't know about the simplest part, but backing up the card directly mounted in your PC will be the fastest file transfer, and will provide the safest backup storage. As you can read here, when the SD card is in the phone, it can be a crap shoot. My personal opinion is that the card holders are probably poor quality, coupled with possibly poor soldering when they are mounted. This would make a lot of intermittent failure, which seems to sum up all the reports of dying SD cards.

I've seen mico SD cards suddenly dismount across a wide variety of Android, Windows Mobile, and the old Palm OS devices over the years. That wide a scope has to be more than an issue with a specific product or manufacturer. It seems like bad hardware to me. Sometimes the cards can be remounted and work fine. Sometimes they will work fine once reformatted. Other times the cards are then useless. I've lost 3 or 4 that way. I imagine that has to do with whether files were being written at the actual moment of dismount.
 
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