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

[quimicosoy]

I think the problem is the GS3, but we can not generalize that ALL of the GS3 are faulty. I have a friend who works at metro pcs and the best phone in this carrier for now is the GS3, he says there are complains about this, but they have sold so many phones without issues as well.

I have a 2 gb sd card, and no problems at all for over 10 months with heavy use...To tell you the truth I am hesitant in buying a newer/higher capacity card for my GS3 due to all the complains. I just don't want to spend a dime, and go through the hassle...

Anyone having luck with specific cards?

 

[funkylogik]

I 'think', with the Sandisk sds anyway, its only the 16 and 32Gb ones that have the fault. Dont worry about losing money mate they will be replaced. Just be sure to back up anythin u dont wana lose. Ive had the same Sandisk Ultra 32Gb for maybe 7months now with no problem so far but Sandisks seem to be the most common ones to fail in the s3 (theyre probably the most common sd in use though)

 

[davoid]

I 'think', with the Sandisk sds anyway, its only the 16 and 32Gb ones that have the fault.

I'm afraid its not just those capacities. I've had two 64GB Sandisk cards die on me in this phone.

 

[funkylogik]

Ouch mate. Didnt sandisk say it was only the 16/32gb that were affected? Maybe it was 32 and 64

 

[davoid]

Ouch mate. Didnt sandisk say it was only the 16/32gb that were affected? Maybe it was 32 and 64

It was.

The problem affects "a very small percentage of 32GB and 64GB SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSD cards," says the memory card manufacturer.

From the article:

Samsung Galaxy S3 fault is caused by SanDisk memory cards | CNET UK

Yeah it was a drag having to get them replaced. I'm glad I have dropbox automatically upload my photos and sync them to my PC.

I might muster the courage to buy a new one if they've now been fixed.

 

[funkylogik]

Trouble is.. how we gona know which ones have been produced with the fix and which are older stock lol?

 

[davoid]

Trouble is.. how we gona know which ones have been produced with the fix and which are older stock lol?

I know. I might wait a while. I guess it would be good to know how long it takes for their stock to get sold after it is shipped new from their factories.

 

[shello007]

I can vouch for the S3 killing SD cards.

We have two S3 phones and BOTH have destroyed their respective SD cards. And, NO, these were not fake cards and were not bought on eBay; they were both expensive cards, and they both died -- at different times.

So, if your card has not been destroyed -- count yourself lucky.

Happened to me. Lost a lot of pics. All actually, that were captured with the phone since purchase in Dec. 2012. Retrieved a lot with online software.

 

[Pappy62]

I've had several sdcards in my S3 (for various reasons) - of different brands, including a SanDisk 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and even a 64GB - but it's never killed a card... not once.
Maybe I'm just 'lucky'... ?

 

[pauluk1]

Samsung sold 18 million S3 units in Q3 2012. We have 88 posts in this thread and if we assume 80% of them are from single users with issues, that gives us a number of 66 users with this problem.

What percentage of users have the problem? Ido not even want to try and calculate this, but it seems the number would be called 'negligible'

Hi I doubt if 1% of s3 users are aware of this forum especially from around the world and even if some are they might not be aware of this thread so the number of 66 is meaningless.
There is a problem ( not just with s3 though) with micro sd cards if you look at Amazon and feed back it seems between 3 and 12% give various cards one star for not woking after a while ( needs formating, can not be seen etc) and that could be an under estimate as some will fail months later when feedback had already been given.
I had a card saying the same and if you took it out and put it back in it would work again sometimes but got worse so I replaced it just in time for refund.
There is a problem its just a shame no one can pin point the underlying problem.

 

[TheBritton]

This explains the bad reviews on Amazon for the Sandisk SD cards. I was browsing for a 64GB and the reviews mentioned these symptoms which worried me and also surprised me because Sandisk make excellent cards. Now I notice they are all S3 users....

 

[xyz007]

There is definitely some sort of a problem. In my case it would appear that sandisk was that problem. 4 months now without a problem with 32gb Kingston sd card. Maybe there was a bad batch of cards out there and regardless of manufacturer they might have all been made in the same factory on a bad day, month or quarter or something... From what I've read most sd cards that failed were newer. I don't know when my 1st (sandisk) that failed was made, but I bought it in November. Besides as I've said in my previous post: I asked at store whether there is correlation with s3 and sd cards, and the answer was that not much more failed cards then with other gadgets. They changed the card no questions asked...

 

[funkylogik]

Hi I doubt if 1% of s3 users are aware of this forum especially from around the world and even if some are they might not be aware of this thread so the number of 66 is meaningless.
There is a problem ( not just with s3 though) with micro sd cards if you look at Amazon and feed back it seems between 3 and 12% give various cards one star for not woking after a while ( needs formating, can not be seen etc) and that could be an under estimate as some will fail months later when feedback had already been given.
I had a card saying the same and if you took it out and put it back in it would work again sometimes but got worse so I replaced it just in time for refund.
There is a problem its just a shame no one can pin point the underlying problem.

High-5 mate.
Totally agree. For any 5 people complaining about an issue like this on a dedicated android forum, it must equate to..... hundreds of thousands (probably far more lol, i duno how to put numbers to it) of joe-bloggs cases!

 

[TheBritton]

Judging by reviews on Amazon, Kingston seems to be the winner.

I am shopping for a 64 GB Micro SD and the reviews on the Sandisk are very discouraging. The Kingston 64GB only has ONE negative review. Hmm..

 

[HighSierra]

I had this problem with 2 32GB Lexar Micro SD cards in my GS3.

One still works in my camera, but the other is toast. I've had a 4GB Kingston Micro SD card in my GS3 for 3 months with no problems.

 

[CybrGuy]

Nevermind the fact that only a small percentage of S3 users even HAVE an mSD card in the phone. No SD card, no problem...

I wanted to add that my 32GB Sandisk card worked perfectly for over 4 months before it's spectacular failure taking my data with it. Fortunately much of the data was backed up, but still...

SanDisk has been very cooperative in replacing the card and I should have a new one soon, but this problem should not have occurred. The fact is, if SanDisk is replacing them with little grief, they must be pretty confident that the problem is in the card.

 

[CybrGuy]

I had this problem with 2 32GB Lexar Micro SD cards in my GS3.

One still works in my camera, but the other is toast. I've had a 4GB Kingston Micro SD card in my GS3 for 3 months with no problems.

I wonder if there is a way to discover who makes whose cards?

 

[Frostypawz]

I'm apprehensive about getting a card for my phone.Unless I'm mistaken,from what I've heard the problem seems to be with only higher capacity cards (32,64).Of course,with the exception of possibly a 16,those are only ones typically someone will want to use.

The problem kind of reminds me of another issue I had a few years back when I was into using DVD-r media.It seems that many of the blank discs available were garbage due to substandard manufacturing processes.When recording video you could not burn past about 4 gig on many of the better ones without glitches.Surprisingly,this happened with bad batches from all major respected companies.Cheaper media would often result in glitches all the way through a burned disk.Many people probably archived data on these that is corrupted despite getting reports of a successful burn.As I remember,dual layer media was never reliable period!

Though the issue with sd cards is a bit different,I have to wonder if the ability to cheaply AND reliably manufacture the HIGHER capacity cards hasn't been outpaced by the public's desire for the denser cards.Perhaps all the companies including Sandisk have had batches made at sub par third party factories to undercut a competing brands pricing.This was certainly the case with DVD-r media.

For this to be true I suppose there should be some evidence on the web of high capacity card failures in other types of devices.Maybe I should have googled that before writing such a long post...

 

[Gladiator2002]

How NetApp FlashRay Will Disrupt Enterprise Storage, Using Low-Cost Flash Memory (video) - Forbes

"Spinning disks don’t wear out, they
fail. But Flash predictably wears out
because of the amount of the writing
you do. Actually the length of time that
your SSD runs is completely dependent
on the workload. This is the thing that
hard disk drives never had. Your
workload didn’t cause your hard disk
drives to fail faster. But if you have a
write-intensive workload for a high
performance application going to
Flash, you’ll wear it out faster, explains
Brian Pawlowski, NetApp’s senior VP.
The one big difference between
spinning disk and Flash-based systems
is spinning disk controller designers
never worried about wearing disk out,
so there is inefficiencies in how the
applications are written."

 

[funkylogik]

I'm apprehensive about getting a card for my phone.Unless I'm mistaken,from what I've heard the problem seems to be with only higher capacity cards (32,64).Of course,with the exception of possibly a 16,those are only ones typically someone will want to use.

The problem kind of reminds me of another issue I had a few years back when I was into using DVD-r media.It seems that many of the blank discs available were garbage due to substandard manufacturing processes.When recording video you could not burn past about 4 gig on many of the better ones without glitches.Surprisingly,this happened with bad batches from all major respected companies.Cheaper media would often result in glitches all the way through a burned disk.Many people probably archived data on these that is corrupted despite getting reports of a successful burn.As I remember,dual layer media was never reliable period!

Though the issue with sd cards is a bit different,I have to wonder if the ability to cheaply AND reliably manufacture the HIGHER capacity cards hasn't been outpaced by the public's desire for the denser cards.Perhaps all the companies including Sandisk have had batches made at sub par third party factories to undercut a competing brands pricing.This was certainly the case with DVD-r media.

For this to be true I suppose there should be some evidence on the web of high capacity card failures in other types of devices.Maybe I should have googled that before writing such a long post...

im not ready to blame Sandisk or any of the SD manufacturers tbh.
From what ive read, this problem affects different brands of SD so the common denominator is >2012 galaxy flagships.
If it was just sub-par manufacturing of the cards then it should be visible in atleast all of the current "power-phones".
Samsung is the biggest global android OEM so it would make perfect business sense for Sandisk to take the blame, bow to Samsung, and change their manufacturing with a fix to suit Samsung phones.
Im not sayin thats whats happened but its more than possible :thumbup:

 

[TheBritton]

im not ready to blame Sandisk or any of the SD manufacturers tbh.
From what ive read, this problem affects different brands of SD so the common denominator is >2012 galaxy flagships.
If it was just sub-par manufacturing of the cards then it should be visible in atleast all of the current "power-phones".
Samsung is the biggest global android OEM so it would make perfect business sense for Sandisk to take the blame, bow to Samsung, and change their manufacturing with a fix to suit Samsung phones.
Im not sayin thats whats happened but its more than possible :thumbup:

Yep. It is strange that 99% of the negative reviews on Amazon for the Sandisk 64GB mention they are S3 users... go take a look

 

[S3user2013]

I have same issues, S3 kills the data in Micro SD card. and also kills Micro SD card.

I used this phone since July, 2012.

It happened often, the phone rebooted and the welcome Samsung logo appeared on the screen.

When it occurred, it would make my SD card unreadable sometimes.
But the SD card was working in the next day. But some information has lost.
I have no idea what's going on.

In the beginning, I thought maybe the MicroSD quality was no good, therefore I've changed another MicroSD with well known brand. But it still happened.

Currently, same issue occurred. I don't know if my 32G Micro SD card can work probably in next day or not.

I took out the Micro SD card and tried to read it through PC computer. The Micro SD card is not readable. Computer can't find the Micro SD card from SD slot.

This really is the issues from Samsung S3 device.

I have never have a MicroSD card dead before. I used HTC device before for several years, my old 8G Micro SD card is still working.

 

[TheBritton]

Well, that is unfortunate news to hear, but I am thankful for the information. It's looking more and more like it's not an issue with the sd card but the device itself.

If the speculation is true as evidence suggests, it's sad that Sandisk is getting such bad reviews as a result. It seems Kingston has the best life expectancy in the S3 according to reviewers on several sites, Amazon included.

Does the "sd sudden death syndrome" as I've just spontaneously called it .. does it affect all the S3 users? Are there any users reading this that haven't had any sd card issues?

Oh on more thing out of curiousity.. s3user2013, what size card was it that died?

 

[shadowspawn]

Honestly, I've spoken to a bunch of Verizon and Sprint reps about phones etc. From my understanding, of all the phones that had issues with them, Samsung phones, namely the S3, has been the one to have the most issues. Granted, it's also one of the best selling phones out there right now, but even at that, you don't see this many iPhones or HTC's with such problems.

Hell it was apparently so bad, the Sprint rep to whom I was discussing the S4 vs. HTC One vs. Xperia Z with told me to "stay away from Samsung". And honestly, I have to agree with him. Of the major players Apple, Samsung, HTC, and LG, Samsung phones have been the most commonly returned in my store so far. One guy had a Note with AT&T that would only boot into Odin for some reason. A lady had an S3 that would respond intermittently to touch interface. Others have had the aforementioned SD card issues. Others have had issues regarding data phasing in and out for no apparent reason at all.

@Britton: So far, it seems much more common on Sprint S3s than on AT&T or Verizon S3s. I have a feeling it's mostly because we don't sell as many AT&T S3s and that people get insurance from Diamond Wireless for their Verizon S3s here though. On AT&T we sell more iPhones than anything else and with Sprint's S3s dipping as low as $49, I'd say it's the most popular S3 flavor out there at our location.

 

[HighSierra]

I wonder if there is a way to discover who makes whose cards?

My thoughts exactly.