PNY launches 512GB microSD card

I have Surface Pro 4. Any problems updating Windows 10? Pro 4 was acting up in version 1803 so I fresh installed to version 1703 and all is well!

The only card that has ever given me problems was a Samsung card. It had all the correct speed ratings but couldn't keep up with my SLR's video stream. I switched to a much cheaper, generic-looking Verbatim card and never saw a single buffer overflow. All these stupid speed logos on memory cards are crazy, as none of them solve the problem they are designed to fix, which is a true indication of their ability.

I believe I was.

It wasn't some expensive item. It was like 4GB USB stick--something like 12usd. If it had been a 64GB USB drive, at that time it would have cost a good bit of money.

I've had other USB drives fail, but not before months of heavy use.

I use this tool for testing storage devices:
https://www.heise.de/download/product/h2testw-50539/download

Should be faster than fully formatting the drive and shows read/write performance.

Michael_13:

Thank you, I'll certainly give it a look.

But part of the purpose of the full format is the machine run time itself.

It's a good idea to put machinery, new or used, through several complete repetitions of its intended use before committing it to end use. (Correct, there are exceptions about antique machines, that one just wants to use for show, or that one will never use more than lightly.)

And formatting emulates long write times on a drive real well.

I should have mentioned: This is exactly what this tool can do. It fills up the drive/card completely with random files and reads these back so that you detect if there are any errors or if the card's size is a fake.

what is really amazing is the sheer number of fakes out there

12 usd for a 256gb card ???
16 usd for a 128gb card ???

many many scams..... its insane

and the absolute worst internet site passing off counterfeit cards ???

am azon ....yes am azon ... and they know and have known for ages and continue present these criminally fraudulent cards for ages .... dozens of reviews by ripped off customers seems not to matter

years and years pass and nothing changes im sure this is because a certain number dont realize until months later and say "oh well" "card failure " not realizing it was a ripoff conspiracy with 2 vendors participating

mindboggeling

Michael_13:

Yes, that it an important bit of information.

cosinaphile:

To be clear my PNY USB stick failure was NOT a fake PNY device, and its storage capacity was accurately represented.

No, I didn't ever test read/write speeds.

Not purchased at the parent company of DPR.

i did not mean to suggest your card was fake .... ive had real cards fail from every maker , in fact last year a 128 gb sandisk card failed that only had films and music and a 32 g b fuji card died in my x 30 due to dirty contacts corrupting the FAT as well

michaels mention of the tool as ALSO useful to detect fakes was what prompted my comment .....not your format failure event

Keep in mind that if you're using the Windows tools (the tools built into Windows out of the box) to do this "full format" if it encounters a bad memory cell, it usually just marks it as bad and doesn't write to it, which for most people isn't a problem, so you still could have a defective stick, but you may never know it. Quite honestly, I don't bother with the full format upon purchase simply because you could do that, and it might fail the next day. The only USB sticks that failed on me were two PNY sticks (for no apparent reason), and a Sandisk (which went through the wash and dry cycle so I sort of expected that one to fail--but it still worked for a few months after that incident and eventually stopped working, but even so, I was surprised it worked after a high-heat dry cycle).

sirhawkeye64:

As best as I can tell, that hypothetical one marked dead cell wouldn't ever see data so wouldn't fail, or some saving data process would write to the "dead" cell and that particular file would be corrupted. To my understanding that's not a dead USB stick, it's a dead cell/sector.

But my PNY USB drive simply failed entirely when I attempted to use it for data storage after the full format.

Yes sorry. My point was that no stick or memory chip can be 100% good, but because of how this is handled in formatting, the user may never know using some tools versus others.

As to your entire USB drive going bad, yes this is true as well. You could fully format it one day without any issues, and have it go bad the next. What I was really getting at was those who think that by fully formatting the card, it's good and "can't" or "won't" fail anytime soon because it didn't fail the format.

sirhawkeye64:

"What I was really getting at was those who think that by fully formatting the card, it's good and "can't" or "won't" fail anytime soon because it didn't fail the format."

To my mind the formatting, though not perfect, does test the "soon" part of a potential failure.

Now if you mean that a sector could fail soon, yes that could occur, even after a full format as a test.

When I've had drives or solid state devices fail, it's rarely been mostly about failed sectors--it's been failed controller electronics.

Failing sectors, while the control electronics are still working, give some warning.

Yes you are correct. In many cases its the controllers that end up failing. Happened to me on a Samsung mSATA card (which was past due for replacement obviously, at 6 years of being a system drive).

sirhawkey64:

And I just had a 6 year old platter SATA HDD start to show bad sectors. It too was my OS drive, so I cloned it over to a new drive.

But that 6 year old drive does still work (I know because I had to redo the clone, 5 weeks later, since my pursuit of 43GB of unassigned drive space in the new drive had killed its capacity to run the OS). Years ago had an 80GB platter storage drive fail. So I took it out of the case, and bought a new case for $14 and attempted to revive it. That trick didn't work, so clearly some internal controller wasn't working.

Be careful - some versions and adoptions by oems of Android phones limit what you can use the cards for.

yes some cellphone are designed to crack all the time so a certain manufacturer can charge youj 300 bucks to fix ....say the "x"

its easy to get away with when your parishioners are your customers

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/iphone-x-screen-repair-cost-revealed-and-its-seriously-expensive-3318509

http://fortune.com/2017/10/27/apple-iphone-x-repair-cost/

anyway apple is the phone most popular in old age homes
old men outspend on apple over any other demographic
.. im glad as an aging white male i have not sipped this coolaid

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/29/technology/apple-customers/index.html

I think lack of adding storage is one reason why people are dumping Apple (that and the lack of the headphone jack, which in my mind is dumb). At least companies like Samsung (and others) realize this and still offer micro SD card slot options on their devices. I mean, from a marketing standpoint, it makes Apple more money because people probably just think "I might as well get the 256GB version as I'll probably fill up a 128GB phone quickly." That's why I left Apple (among other reasons)... because I wanted to be able to add storage as I needed/wanted to, and more importantly, so I could move data back and forth between my phone and computer without the need for software (iTunes).

I'm going to assume that the Surface Pro uses the same kind of internal SSD that the MacBook Pro does, NVMe, which is extraordinarily fast. 4-6x faster than a garden variety Crucial/Samsung SATA SSD (that "normal" laptops use), and 20-25x the speed of this PNY card.

If you buy an NVMe SSD yourself, it doesn't cost that much less than what Microsoft/Apple charge. The reason for the high storage upgrade price is not markups, it's because it's the fastest storage you can get right now by a very large margin.

The only way you're getting ripped off on that storage upgrade is if Microsoft is using SATA instead of NVMe. I guess you could feel ripped off if all you want is a SATA SSD, but at only 1/5 the speed of what MS and Apple offer, that's not going in.

If they still grade memory the way they used to grade CPU speed (test them off the line and stamp a speed on them) they you could charge whatever you want for the pick of the crop. CCD's for medical equipment used to cost 10x what regular ones did because they were more linear and had fewer flaws.

I'm not sure about the 2017 SP line, but the SP4s had commercial M.2 SSDs. The move to solder chips onto the board by MS and Apple was simply a cost cutting measure to improve margins. the small SP4s (128GB) actually had notoriously slow SSDs, with the shipping models carrying substantially slower parts than those sent to reviewers the month before launch. Don't get me wrong - they're faster than a SATA SSD (except the 128s), but only due to the inherent bottle neck of the SATA bus. A uSD is nowhere near the speed of a M.2, but sometimes you simply need always-available offline storage more than peak read/write speed.

That sounds like you haven't been buying very many SD cards if they're the only ones that have failed on you.

I can get 10 TB for that much! Long live the HDD!

This would work for apple...wait..what

three little USB to MicroSD card reader dongles, a powered USB 3.0 hub.. instant super cheap solid state RAID. (the 256GB cards, not the 512s.)

..

Oh please. When it comes to storage, THAT has to be one of the dumbest sayings ever.

I still think that 32 gb card for photography (~1000 raw shots) is the reasonable limit

@khunpapa - it made sense back then, it makes sense now. With a 512GB card I can shoot an entire 2 week trip on a single card. But unless I have an option of backing up the pictures every day I really shouldn't be doing it. The card failes, my camera gets stolen, lands in the ocean, etc- I loose all my pictures. If I use 16GB cards, I can swap them every day.