Reliable SD Card source ?
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I have noticed a few SD card issue threads.
And I have recently been fighting more than a few what turned our to be SD card issues.
I generally dont buy SD cards online for fear of getting cheap Chinese fakes, I try to buy locally from somewhat reputable electronic outlets.
Buying either "Scandisk" or "Transend" 8gb cards
And as I have more than a few printers I always have at least 10 spare cards, and I always do a full overwrite format.
But recently I suffered a few failed prints with a printer acting just plain weird, stopping mid print or failing to home properly, all of which i have replaced the SD card on and even then a brand new SD card has sometimes turned out to be faulty, that threw me and made me look for problems that weren't actually there.
I keep a master back-up of all my printers SD cards on my PC so I revert to the master instead of trying to copy possible corrupt file on to a new card.
And as cards a generally quite cheap any suspect card automatically gets snapped in half and binned, it's just not worth it.
So where are people generally getting good quality reliable cards ? brand, size etc etc?
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@CaLviNx I generally buy SanDisk and get them via Amazon but I don't know if that's an option in your part of the world.
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@CaLviNx said in Reliable SD Card source ?:
But recently I suffered a few failed prints with a printer acting just plain weird,
Is your SD in a heated chamber by any chance?
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SLC is "always" an option for reliability, but given the price is probably in the 10x range, you can break a few cards before breaking even.
But if reliability is key, then it might be worth it non the less. Other than that try a card rated for application use (A1) and the bigger the card the more you'll spread the write wear before running into issues; on the other hand if the issue is environmental like zapta is suggesting then the industrial cards will also help if the issue isn't the socket.
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SanDisk SD, SDHC, microSD and microSDHC memory cards are capable of withstanding operating temperatures from -13ºF to 185ºF (-25ºC to 85 ºC), so no issue inside an enclosure
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@bearer said in Reliable SD Card source ?:
SLC is "always" an option for reliability, but given the price is probably in the 10x range, you can break a few cards before breaking even.
It's interesting that SanDisk represents MLC (4 levels per cell) as high reliability and industrial, because it can get even denser with 32 levels per cell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell
This company sells industrial SLC cards for a reasonable price but never heard of them before so don't know how good they are.
https://www.amazon.com/ATP-2GB-Industrial-Grade-40C/dp/B076PNFYVR
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No, on my two with chambers I have the electronics under the chamber insulated and a constant cold airflow, but temps are generally hotter here (Cyprus) so that might be a factor to investigate, thanks to all for the suggestions
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@zapta said in Reliable SD Card source ?:
It's interesting that SanDisk represents MLC (4 levels per cell) as high reliability and industrial, because it can get even denser with 32 levels per cell.
i'd say higher density is worse as a single failure will destory more data, and more data possibly sharing erase operations* where the SLC still has MLC beat by an order of magnitude (but admittedly I've not been keeping up with the development on that front)
*) but if erase happens on a page by page basis then maybe not a big factor unless cells span pages.
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Thanks for all the helpful comments.
I have bought some ScanDisk Industrial cards to see if they stand up any better.
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You could try a Sandisk Extreme III, it handle 85°C
