Help SD card works on phone and 1 tablet, not on 2 other tablets???

[Oreosnax]

Hi folks!

i use a tablet as my primary computer, with a large SD card as my 'hard drive'

My current tablet is dying the death of 1000 cuts.

I ordered a new tablet, and was surprised to see that it couldn't read the SD card. I tried a second SD card, and it couldn't read that one either. I figured this was just a defective tablet and sent it back.

Ordered a new tablet of a different brand. Same problem.

Meanwhile, my original tablet continues to degrade, and can no longer connect to anything via wifi or Bluetooth, which makes transferring files elsewhere difficult

Stuck my hard drive SD card in my phone and it works fine. Copying my most precious data to my phone, for now, but the phone can't hold everything

Did I just get two bad tablets in a row, from two different companies? Or is there something else going on here? Some thing I need to know before I order a third tablet?

thanks very much for any insights!

 

[mikedt]

How is your SD formatted? If it's exFAT or NTFS, not all Android devices support that? Some might be FAT32 format only.

 

[AugieTN]

Android tablets? Model?

 

[ocnbrze]

hard to say. what tablet do you have?

and with most devices, you get what you pay for. so a cheap tablet is that a cheap tablet.

 

[Oreosnax]

How do I find out how my SD card is formatted? I did it years ago and I don't remember

 

[Oreosnax]

(The tablets in question are not name brands that anyone would recognize. and sure,that could be part of the problem

 

[Oreosnax]

I appreciate folks who have responded! I'm still trying to figure out what to do about the situation. Sorry my replies are choppy. I am on an awkward borrowed device

 

[ocnbrze]

the only thing you can do is backup the sd card and reformat it. what brand sd card is it? try getting a brand new card.

 

[ocnbrze]

How do I find out how my SD card is formatted? I did it years ago and I don't remember

if you have a real computer, that should be easy to find out. not sure how you would do that on an android device.

(The tablets in question are not name brands that anyone would recognize. and sure,that could be part of the problem

i think that it might be a big part of the problem.

 

[Oreosnax]

It's a sandisk card. I guess I could back it up to Google Drive or something, and format it

but that doesn't really answer the question of why it works on 2 devices, and doesn't work on 2 -other- devices

Reading other threads here, it sounds like people are not using SD cards very much anymore? What are people using instead, for larger storage on a tablet?

I travel a lot and I'm not always connected, so cloud storage doesn't work for me

I'm wondering if tablet manufacturers don't care about putting in a working SD card reader, because no one is using them?

 

[Oreosnax]

(TBH, If we're thinking the card is the problem, I wouldn't really format it; I would just buy a new one. They are cheap enough these days. But I'm not sure if the card is the problem, since at least one device couldn't read my backup to the backup card, either)

 

[mikedt]

It's a sandisk card. I guess I could back it up to Google Drive or something, and format it

but that doesn't really answer the question of why it works on 2 devices, and doesn't work on 2 -other- devices

If the SD was formatting in something that's not supported by all your devices, e.g. NTFS or exFAT. For an SD to be guaranteed usable by all Android devices it's should be in FAT32 format.

 

[mikedt]

(The tablets in question are not name brands that anyone would recognize. and sure,that could be part of the problem

If it's something off-brand and/or cheapo, especially if running a deprecated unsupported Android version, then that could well be the problem if the SD isn't FAT32 format.

 

[Oreosnax]

OK, how do I find out what system it is formatted in?

 

[ocnbrze]

curious have you tried different cards on the new tablets? maybe it is your devices even though they are brand new.

 

[Windroid]

I had much the same problem: My Android 2 tablet couldn't read an SD card I wanted to use with it. So, seeing as the card had no data I cared about keeping, I formatted the card on my Android 2 tablet itself. Then, the card worked fine with all of my computers (and tablets/smartphones are computers).

Your situation is trickier. You do have data you care about on that SD card, so you can't just format it to make it work.