Solved: Fast Battery Drain

[Nazrac]

Background

My Galaxy S3 battery was draining very fast. It was going down at a rate of about 15% per hour sitting idle. It would drain at 25% per hour if I used it.

I figured it was the battery so I bought a new one. The same thing happened with the new battery.

So I reset the phone back to factory settings. The battery continued to drain.

Then I noticed that I was getting errors reading from my SD card. It is a 32GB Scandisk. I reformatted it but the errors continued. It got progressively worse as the card started to unmount itself at random. This caused the phone to remount it and go through a full media scan. Eventually the card died all together.

So I put an old 16GB Patriot card in and no more battery drain! It is back to 2.5-3% drain per hour idle and about 10% per hour active. Perfect! I only have to charge my phone once a day now.

Solution

If you are having an unexplainable battery drain, try replacing the SD card.

 

[Rukbat]

Suggestion: Contact San Disk. They're very good about replacing defective products.

 

[funkylogik]

10hrs screen time? Are you sure mate

 

[jilawrence]

Hi Nazrac.

A similar thing happened to me, and I narrowed it down to the SD card by using a wakelock app. Unfortunately the S3 has a known issue with corrupting SD cards. Mine had already corrupted one, although I'd managed to get it going again by doing a reformat.

Seems once the card is no longer recognised by the phone properly, it continually scans it trying to read the data, which can drain the battery fast. Remove the card or replace with a non-corrupt one, and the problem is solved.

However as it'll very likely do it again, I've now decided to just remove the card completely, as I wasn't using it anyway due to the 16gb of internal memory. As I store very little music on my phone it doesn't bother me, however it's a much bigger issue to those who do.

Watch out it doesn't do the same thing to your Patriot card, as I'm afraid eventually it probably will!

Cheers,
James.

 

[Galaxy Tab2 47]

Background

My Galaxy S3 battery was draining very fast. It was going down at a rate of about 15% per hour sitting idle. It would drain at 25% per hour if I used it.

I figured it was the battery so I bought a new one. The same thing happened with the new battery.

So I reset the phone back to factory settings. The battery continued to drain.

Then I noticed that I was getting errors reading from my SD card. It is a 32GB Scandisk. I reformatted it but the errors continued. It got progressively worse as the card started to unmount itself at random. This caused the phone to remount it and go through a full media scan. Eventually the card died all together.

So I put an old 16GB Patriot card in and no more battery drain! It is back to 2.5-3% drain per hour idle and about 10% per hour active. Perfect! I only have to charge my phone once a day now.

Solution

If you are having an unexplainable battery drain, try replacing the SD card.

I went with a 32gb Samsung OEM card,this way if I have a problem I can have Samsung work it out for me.

 

[Yatezy]

Could this possibly be a TouchWiz problem? I used to always get a high media scanner wakelock when i was on TW ROMs but since moving over to AOSP builds its none existent

 

[funkylogik]

Ditto. Same card :thumbup:
Remember the s3 was infamous for "frying" SDs? Id love to know if that ever happened on aosp..