The Death of My SanDisk SD Card

MichaelV

I just had my first SD card die.  I had bought a SanDisk Ultra SD card at Costco for my Samsung Note 4.  After a while some pictures I took with it started not to show on the phone and the SD card could not take a format.  Fortunately, I was able to rescue all the pictures off of the phone. I learned through message boards that SanDisk had admitted to a problem and many people had problems.  Fortunately, there is a 5 a year warranty, but unfortunately I have no idea where I can get the receipt for the warranty return.  I cant remember when I purchased it from Costco or if I paid cash or which credit card did I use.  Even if I did find the receipt, would I want to get a replacement from SanDisk.  Instead, I ordered a Samsung Pro Evo SDXC 128 gb SD card not wanting to risk a repeat performance with the Sandisk.  Fortunately, this is just my cell phone SD card and I was able to rescue all of the photos, but unfortunately the card does contain many photos of my personal adventures.  

http://www.phonearena.com/news/SanDisk-says-it-produced-some-bad-32GB-and-64GB-microSD-cards_id40986

I had always thought most, if not all, memory card failures are as a result of photographer error or are more of an internet myth.  I also thought that SanDisk was somehow superior to all other brands and that the only brand to get is SanDisk.  I will admit that I might have been  wrong on these assumptions.  

Instead of getting a new card off of the Amazon website or from Costco, I decided to get a new card right off of the Samsung website paying a little more, but with some assurance that its not a bootleg card.  Things like memory cards probably should not be bought off of Amazon or Ebay because of the bootleg market which exists for these products.  

The moral of the story is that the San Disk brand is not infallible and its probably best to use dual cards in the dual card slot dslr.  For the Canon 5D Mark III I know some people will have the RAW image go to the Compact Flash card and the Jpeg go to the SD Card.  The only issue with my lovable Canon is that the buffer fills up very quickly with this setup.  Some people have told me for that reason they will put the SD Card Jpeg on Medium resolution so the cameras buffer wont fill so easily.  Being stuck with a medium resolution photo is better than none at all and the buffer wont fill so fast during a fast moving event.  Another thing is that I had purchased the "Ultra" brand which is not part of their "Extreme" series thinking that this should be good enough for my cell phone.  Probably best to stick with the memory manufacturers higher brands.