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[PSA] Sandisk SD card causing BSoD

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blueskull:
My 4 year old Sandisk Ultra 256GB has finally bit the dust, despite having seen less than 20 total write cycles (5TBW).
Granted, some part of it was written quite a few times, particularly partition table, maybe 200 times.

Today, it was failing in a funny way. It retains data written to it, partition table, but not drive letter assignment.
It threw PFN_LIST_CORRUPT and KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CURRUPTION BSoDs when I attempt to reassign drive letter.

I initially thought it was Windows update doing funny things, but I tried the same operation on a 256GB Samsung thumb drive, and it worked.
I then raised suspicion on the SD card reader, and tried another 16GB Sandisk, and it worked.

So, either Windows 10 has a bug handling high capacity cards (in this case, 256GB), or this card is faulty.

Considering my positive experience with the 256GB thumb drive and large SSDs, I bet it's the fault of the card.
Failure of 4 year old card with less than 20 P/E cycles is not acceptable from Sandisk, and I'd like to know if you have similar oops moments.
It was never subject to ESD or other stress situations. It pretty much spent its entire life in a phone (Sony, then OnePlus) or a Surface (Go and Pro 7).

PS. I'm not that shocked either. I had Toshiba card early failures before, so Toshiba (shares fab with Sandisk) NAND failure is expected.

Just ordered a Samsung card. Let's see how long does this one last.

Ampera:
I'd say it not working in one machine (a Windows machine at that) does not definitively prove that it's gone bad. I'd suggest doing some tests on Linux, if you know how, to see if it's actually gone bad.

magic:

--- Quote from: blueskull on October 29, 2019, 08:27:27 am ---Today, it was failing in a funny way. It retains data written to it, partition table, but not drive letter assignment.

--- End quote ---
I'm not entirely sure, I haven't used Windows in ages, but I think drive letter assignments aren't stored on the card but they are specific to your machine and stored locally on your machine. At any rate, it would be a weird card which manages to store all data correctly except for some tiny bit of Windows metadata.


--- Quote from: blueskull on October 29, 2019, 08:27:27 am ---It threw PFN_LIST_CORRUPT and KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CURRUPTION BSoDs when I attempt to reassign drive letter.

--- End quote ---
These are memory corruption errors, wrong data being written to a wrong place in RAM.
This is absolutely a software bug, probably a buffer overrun or wrong pointer being used, usually resulting from a failure to correctly handle some corner case the developer didn't anticipate.
This unexpected case may be hardware fault, or it may be some unlucky combination of unusual but valid hardware and user behavior.

I would try "deep" format. Erase/trim the entire card, recreate partitions (be sure to preserve the original alignment) and format. It should restore all software-visible state (except for write latency ::)) to some sane defaults.

Ampera:
I don't mean to be pedantic, but don't use the term low level format, as it means something completely different than just wiping the card. It's supposed to refer to the creation of magnetic track layouts (and any other modulation or such) on mechanical hard drives. Just something to avoid confusion.

My suggestion is to start simple and work your way up. It's possible there's something in the partition table that's making Windows bug out. Using a tool like fdisk (linux), rewrite the partition table (GPT or MBR) and then repartition and reformat. Since you're using Darwin Unix, there's likely other manners of going about what you might be trying to accomplish. You could use dd to nuke the first, oh let's say 50MB (to be sure) of the SD card and then give it back to Windows to figure something out. (note partition tables tend to keep redundant copies, so you might want to nuke the last 50MB of the card too, or just rewrite the partition table using a tool)

The fact that it mounts to a folder in Windows is actually quite weird, and while I may, in my spare time, like to pick on Windows, it usually doesn't break like /this/. That being said, there has never been any shortage of trouble people have had with drive letter assignments, so what do I know.

Ampera:
Huh? I've never heard of that. I mean I can't say I've used large SD cards a whole lot, but that is properly strange.

May I ask what partition table the SD card(s) is(are) using?

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