Formatting a 128gb Micro SDXC.. how? Card doa?

gizmo1990 · 27 Jul 2018 at 23:13

I've been trying to format a new 128gb Micro SDXC card on my Windows 7 pc and am having no joy at all. I've downloaded SD Card Formatter, which is supposed to be the SD organisations official tool and it just lets me format it to 1.88mb... :eek:

I've also tried it in my 2015 mbp and disk utility spits out 'Erase process has failed'.

Am I doing something incredibly daft or is the card a dud?

Any help much appreciated.

hyperseven · 27 Jul 2018 at 23:35

reader doesn't support high capacity SD cards? Are you using one that came with it?

gizmo1990 · 28 Jul 2018 at 00:07

@hyperseven Thanks for the reply. It came with an SC Adaptor. I'm using an old usb2 card reader. I just presume that should work with these new cards, doesn't it? They're all backward compatible..? If not I'd of thought the mbp would be able to read it?

Skynet5 · 28 Jul 2018 at 08:28

Where you buy it from? Plenty of fake memory cards come in from China.

gizmo1990 · 28 Jul 2018 at 10:30

Amazon, them not a reseller too. Sandisk so it's definitely legit. :confused:

andy_mk3 · 28 Jul 2018 at 11:07

gizmo1990 said:
Amazon, them not a reseller too. Sandisk so it's definitely legit.

Even from amazon its been known to get fakes I think

wam7 · 28 Jul 2018 at 11:13

gizmo1990 said:
Amazon, them not a reseller too. Sandisk so it's definitely legit.

No it's not definitely legit, even if it 'says' SanDisk! You should see some of the fakes that have passed through my hands, even down to the packaging looks authentic. The only way that I could tell it was fake was by doing a speedtest in a USB3.0 adapter and seeing it was less half the advertised speed but everything else worked fine.

The fact that you can only format to 1.88mb is a symptom of some of the early fake ones but I haven't seen those for a while.

You need to rule out your USB2.0 adapter so I would pick up a USB3.0 adapter and try to format it and do a speed test. I have several like this one that I picked up for £3 inc from the Bay

They work great for me and correctly show my SanDisk Extreme Pro MicroSD reading/writing ~90MB/s

Moley · 28 Jul 2018 at 11:13

Can you format it to a lower capacity? 32GB for example? If so format it a few times increasing the capacity each time on the way up to 128GB. When/if it fails, you'll know the actual capacity of the card and if it's less than 128GB it's probably a fake.

gizmo1990 · 28 Jul 2018 at 13:21

Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm very surprised that Amazon themselves could be selling fakes. I wonder how they get into their supply chain?

I can't format it any higher than the 1.88mb unfortunately. If it was my usb2 reader then I'd expect my map to read it and since it doesn't either then I'm expecting the card itself to be either a dud or a fake.

@wam7 Thanks for the suggestion, I've picked one up and will test when it arrives. I reckon it still won't work though because of the failure of the mac to read it.

tom_e · 28 Jul 2018 at 13:23

gizmo1990 said:
Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm very surprised that Amazon themselves could be selling fakes. I wonder how they get into their supply chain?

I can't format it any higher than the 1.88mb unfortunately. If it was my usb2 reader then I'd expect my map to read it and since it doesn't either then I'm expecting the card itself to be either a dud or a fake.

@wam7 Thanks for the suggestion, I've picked one up and will test when it arrives. I reckon it still won't work though because of the failure of the mac to read it.

Amazon mix their stock and their "fulfilled by Amazon" stock together IIRC so if a random seller sends them fakes to keep in their warehouse it gets into their whole supply chain.

heatonpkmassive · 28 Jul 2018 at 16:03

I'm going with fake too. I had a fake Sandisk SD card off Amazon, so it's certainly a good possibility if it's only allowing you to format it to slightly more than the capacity of a 1.44 floppy disk.

gizmo1990 · 31 Jul 2018 at 12:15

Quick update!

The bay reader arrived today, popped the card in and.. it read it perfectly! Now I've got 119gb instead of 1.88mb!

So there you go, new SD cards, at least the high capacity ones, do require specific readers. I can understand my old usb2 one not reading it, but the '15 mbp? Oh well, at least it didn't cost much to get it sorted. Thanks again @wam7 for the suggestion.

wam7 · 31 Jul 2018 at 13:21

gizmo1990 said:
Thanks again @wam7 for the suggestion.

Don't mention it, even though you just did.

Glad you got it sorted. Those USB 3.0 readers are really good though you can get fake ones of those as well (that only read up to 40MB/s maxium.

)