OT SD Card question

[crickleymal]

A question for the computer savvy.

My car radio (and the previous radio) accepts USB sticks and SD cards. So I have a 4GB SanDisk (or is it Kingston I can't rememeber) with a whole load of music on it. Now on one particular track for about 5-10 seconds it sounds as though the connection from the preamp to the amp has been pulled halfway out. The sounds goes all crackly and intermittant. Then it recovers as though nothing has happened.

If I erase the card and replace the music with different stuff the same thing will happen so it's not the data transfer from CD via my PC to the card. Presumably it's a problem with the SD card as it did similar things with the previous radio although it seemed to be worse with that radio. The card is probably 5 years old if that makes a difference. It doesn't happen when using a similar age but smaller capacity (1GB) card.

Any ideas?

[gsteinert]

SD cards use Flash memory - the same thing that's used in SSDs in modern computers.

This does have a limited life - it can only be read and write to a certain number of times.

Normally the storage controller will mark bad sectors and not use them, so you should never really notice unless it gets to the point that you notice there's not as much space available as there used to be.

Try formatting the card (plug it into your computer, right click on the drive and click format) and putting you're music back on.

If that doesn't work I'd suggest is time to get a new card. They're pretty cheap from fleabay nowadays anyway.

Gary

[crickleymal]

Thanks. I've never formatted a SD card to my knowledge, so I'll try that tonight. It's about time for a change of music.

[Deleted]

+1 for a re-format, and then replace

[soggybiker]

Just bought a 32gb card for the camera for £9.79 and 2 Samsung 32gb micro SD cards for £12.00 each. As suggested a format will probably fix it but a new card wont break the bank. USage on flash should be a minimum of 6000 read/writes so that's probably a red herring. Not ejecting it correctly can damage the indexing and cause corruption.

[crickleymal]

If I'd managed to get out of my pit earlier this morning I could have bought a load of SD cards cheap at the car boot sale in Gloucester, but I didn't.