[SOLVED] 150x sdcard 4gb - loses data while copying/etc

[xanas3712]

Ok, i just bought 2 of these and at least one of them appears to have the problem if not both.

Basically what happens is that if i attempt to copy and fill them with 4 gigs straight up then the whole thing doesn't copy, whether by kde or in console I get no failures or errors, I get to find out afterward that it only copied some of what I told it to.

Then, if I copy folder by folder, It will do it and I'll go in and check the files, but as soon as I start another copy operation sometime it'll just drop all the other files i just had (I'm listening to the music/etc. to check). The files "disappear" yet when I try to repaste it'll say they are there, even if refreshing won't make them show and.. other such. So it's very odd.

I figure these things are just pieces of junk and may already be failing, or maybe this is an issue on my PC.

Anyone have any ideas concerning this stuff?

As far as my card reader goes it's pretty standard issue 7in1 usb2 and it has worked fine with my compact flash (only 256 meg) up until now.

EDIT: ok now checking I see I must have reached the write limit extremely fast (man these things suck.. ) I just copy a folder over, wait until it shows it's ready and then I unmount, mount it again, and while the folder is there the files in it are gone..

Now it won't let me make a folder and it says I'm attempting to write past the end of the device..

If anyone knows a workaround for this so I can just get my files on there in one shot I"ll be happy. I don't plan on deleting anything after this, I knew about limited writes but this is just insane....

Timeline:

Attempted to copy ~ 3.2 G of music to the card
didn't thorougly copy even though operation was complete so
umount /dev/sdd1
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdd1
mount
try to copy again this time through console to see if there are errors (prev used kde)
no errors, but not thorough again
try folder by folder..

I can see how I'd get probably about 3k writes in this span of actions if we are talking about 1000 music files or so, but I don't know that it's that many I guess I could check. It's certainly not anywhere the 100k I hear is a limit on these stupid flash memory hunks of junk. Is there a more thorough format method that would prevent these issues?

Any help would be appreciated.

[frostschutz]

Some card readers (old models) do not support SD cards that are larger than $SIZE, where $SIZE may be anything from 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, etc.

Also, card readers may break - I have a USB HUB / card reader combo device (Typhoon something), it was working fine for a year or two, but now it procudes random read / write errors with all SD cards even though the same cards work fine in another reader. So never assume that a card is defective if you haven't tested it in at least two different readers / brands.

If it's the system that is losing the data, there should be some notion of it in the kernel log (dmesg).

[xanas3712]

Ok.. I am getting you now.. hmm.. well then...

The card reader allows me to format the thing and the comp says it's 4.1 G when that's been done, I guess this doesn't make any difference?

And if I format the thing again with this, will it format correctly if this card reader only really supports less than 4 gig?

I just don't know.. hmm.

I don't have any card reader handy atm..

[xanas3712]

Ok I tried a reformat of it with the cardreader and then pushing the files over the gp2x (you can't use the gp2x for the formatting part as it won't format correctly according to something else I read, which appears to be correct because I tried it and sure enough the card didn't work that way).

Anyhow, after reformatting and using the gp2x for transfer I still had the same problem, so either the format was wrong because of the card reader, and that was the problem, or the card is just bad.

Anyway being that a card reader at best buy shouldn't be a huge expense I'm going to go ahead and try to go down there and get a card reader after work and hopefully this will help my issue.

I bought 2 cards for the gp2x and I don't know if the other card has the same issue for certain yet. I copied some video to it, but I put under 2 gigs of that on the other card, so not as much data. The gp2x was able to display some of the videos just fine, but others not, some it said it didn't support and some it would just seem to stall out (I turned it off and back on after about 30 seconds of waiting). I need to try those files with the card reader and see if my computer can still display them all, if not then I've got to think the card reader is at fault, or that this particular brand just sucks in linux.

It's too bad because I actually did pay attention to the gp2x wiki, which seemed to show that the transcend 4 gb 150x sticks should work fine.

I like the gp2x, but these sd cards have just been a huge pain to me. I was happy to see the thing working and that it had a relatively good screen, seemed like a good purchase until I started dealing with this craptastic sd-card problem.

EDIT: another quick question, what is meant by "10000 insert/remove cycles"? Does that mean complete reformats and overwriting of all data? Or does it mean only 10000 individual transfers, in which case going over this could theoretically occur even if I just attempt to get this right again...

I can't find this information in a search of the net, I searched for a general SD card faq to explain this but wasn't able to find anything.

[xanas3712]

Updated to solved.

I didn't buy another card reader instead I just tried out the card reader in windows, found that it only recognized in windows that the cards had 1 gig available, so apparently that reader doesn't support the cards very well. So I was able to reformat the sd cards both under windows xp successfully (doesn't work for some reason in linux if you do this, the device doesn't read the files), and I went ahead and copied files in windows too, so not sure if that's necessary but might be.

I'll try some copying in linux (over the gp2x usb link) sometime soon and put an edit here when I have a chance to do that.