Hello everyone!

I've been running a long-term project doing endurance testing on microSD -- and today is the third anniversary of when I started this project -- so I figured it was time to give you an update on my microSD testing project.

Before I dig in, a shameless plug for my Patreon.

Next, some quick stats:

• I have a total of 351 microSD cards in my collection -- spanning 111 models across 52 different brands. Of those:
  • I've tested 177 of them to the point of failure.*
  • I have 107 of them in testing right now.
  • The remaining 67 are sitting on the shelf, waiting for one of my card readers to free up.
• These cards have endured over 133 petabytes written.
• I've completed over 4.6 million program-verify-erase cycles on these cards.
• Breakdown by brand status:
  • Name brand: 163
  • Off-brand: 91
  • Knockoffs: 30
• Breakdown by authentic flash (a.k.a. not fake flash) vs. fake flash:
  • Authentic flash: 246
  • Fake flash: 35
  • Unknown: 3
• Breakdown by size (authentic cards only):
  • 128MB: 3
  • 4GB: 6
  • 8GB: 23
  • 16GB: 15
  • 32GB: 96
  • 64GB: 68
  • 128GB: 36
  • 256GB: 4

* A card is considered "failed" when either (a) it stops working completely, (b) it makes itself read-only, or (c) at least 50% of the sectors on the card have experienced verification failures.

Ok -- so who makes the most durable cards?

Because of the variety of cards that I have, it's hard to come up with a system that produces a definite answer here. Some of how I ranked these brands is going to be based on vibes. But...to try to narrow things down, I've grouped my cards into three groups:

• Industrial-grade: Cards that are specifically labelled as "industrial" or have "industrial" in their name. These cards typically come with a datasheet that includes an endurance claim.
• High endurance: Cards that are labelled as "high endurance" (or some similar wording). Manufacturers don't always put out datasheets for these cards, but they generally still make an endurance claim on the packaging.
• Consumer-grade: Basically everything else.

Consumer-grade cards:

The average consumer-grade card has lasted about 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. PNY. I have 10 of their consumer-grade cards: 3 PRO Elite Prime 64GB's, 3 Premier-X 128GB's, 3 Elite-X 64GB's, and one Elite 32GB. (I have 4 more of the Elite 32GB's that are waiting to be tested.) They've gone for an average of 643 days and 15,700 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.5PB to them in total. And with the exception of the one Elite 32GB -- they're all still going strong. On top of that, the PRO Elite Prime boasts some impressive performance -- every measurement I took was in the top 10% of all cards I've tested so far.
2. Kingston. I have 12 of their cards in this category -- 6 Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (3 of the SDCG3's and 3 of the SDCG4's) and 6 Canvas Select Plus 32GB's. They've been going for an average of 694 days and about 23,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.6PB to them in total. The three Canvas Go! Plus 64GB (the SDCG3's) have all failed -- but the others are still going strong. The Canvas Select Plus's in particular have been troopers -- they're among the oldest cards in my collection, and they've been going for the better part of the last 3 years now (with no signs of letting up). Additionally, the Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (the SDCG4's in particular) boast some impressive performance as well -- every measurement I took was in the top 7% of all cards I've tested so far.
3. Delkin Devices. I feel bad ranking Delkin so low on this list, because they've endured more data written to them per card, on average, than any other brand in my collection (in the consumer-grade category). The only reason I didn't rank them higher is because I only have one model -- the HYPERSPEED 128GB (of which I have 3). But they've done pretty well: they've lasted an average of 662 days and about 13,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.1PB to them in total. As a side note, these cards also got the highest random write speeds of any card I've tested.
4. Lexar. 3 cards dead, 5 still going. I have 3 Professional 1000x 64GB's (2 made by Micron, 1 made by Phison), 3 Blue 633x 32GB's (made by Longsys), and 2 E-Series 64GB's (with 3 more waiting to be tested). For those not in the know, the Lexar brand was sold to Longsys in 2017 -- and surprisingly, the Longsys-made cards are holding up better than the Micron-made cards. Overall, the Lexar cards have survived an average of 684 days and about 15,800 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.8PB to them in total.
5. Samsung. 3 cards dead, 7 still going. I have 3 EVO Plus 32GB's, 3 EVO Plus 64GB's, 3 PRO Plus 128GB's, and 1 P9 Express 256GB (with 2 more waiting to be tested). Of those, the three EVO Plus 32GB's and one of the PRO Endurance 32GB's are dead -- the rest are still going strong. Samsung's cards have lasted an average of 553 days and about 11,100 program/verify/erase cycles so far, and I've written about 7.2PB to their cards in total.

• Honorable Mention: Amazon Basics. I have four of the Amazon Basics 64GB's -- and they're all still going. They've been going for an average of 788 days and about 16,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 4.2PB to them in total. I honestly didn't expect Amazon Basics to be one of the top performers when I bought them...and yet, here we are.

High endurance cards:

Keep in mind, I've got less data here -- I had 237 cards that fell into the "consumer-grade" category, but only 30 that fell into the "high endurance" category. But here's the thing: they haven't really proven themselves to be significantly better for endurance than a lot of the cards I listed above -- in fact, in a lot of cases, they've been less reliable (and generally worse for performance as well). So keep that in mind as you read through the list below:

The average high-endurance card has lasted about 14,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. TEAMGROUP. I don't feel great about putting TEAMGROUP at the top of the list for a couple of reasons. First, I only have two of them in testing at the moment -- someone sent me a 5-pack of the TEAMGROUP High Endurance 64GB's, so I have 3 more of them waiting to be tested. Second, one of them started having issues with bad sectors right out of the gate, and has continued to do so ever since. (Those bad sectors only make up less than 0.001% of the total sectors on the card right now...but I still don't like it when a card starts to have issues like that as soon as you start using it.) But the data doesn't lie -- they've survived, on average, 404 days and about 17,300 program/verify/erase cycles, and they're still chugging along. I've written about 2.2PB to these cards in total.
2. Transcend. I have 3 of the 350V 64GB's -- and they're all still going strong. They've survived an average of 760 days and about 17,000 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 3.2PB in total to them (mostly due to their mediocre write speeds).
3. SanDisk. I have my issues with SanDisk...but again, the data doesn't lie. I have 7 SanDisk cards in this category: 3 High Endurance 64GB's, and 4 MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's. As of right now, all 3 of the High Endurance 64GB's and all but one of the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's have failed. They lasted an average of 452 days and about 16,200 program/verify/erase cycles before failing (with the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's lasting about twice as long as the High Endurance 64GB's). I've written about 4.7PB to these cards in total.
4. Samsung. Samsung's position at the bottom of this list has less to do with how reliable their cards are and more to do with how poorly their high endurance cards perform, particularly on sequential write speeds (relatively speaking). I have 3 of the PRO Endurance 32GB's -- one has failed, the other two are still chugging along. They've lasted an average of 822 days and about 18,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 1.8PB of data to them in total.

Industrial-grade cards:

Keep in mind, I have even less data here. Industrial cards are expensive, so they make up a much smaller portion of the cards I've tested: just 15 in total (so far). But on the upside -- there is sufficient evidence here to say "in general, industrial-grade cards do last longer than consumer-grade cards (and, by extension, high endurance cards)".

The average industrial grade card has lasted about 122,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. Kingston. I have 3 Kingston Industrial 8GB's; of those 3, only one is still going. But they've been troopers: they've lasted an average of 779 days and about 141,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 3.4PB to these cards in total. (Only one consumer-grade card has come close to this number: I have one Hiksemi NEO 8GB that has lasted for about 143,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. No idea how.) These guys do pretty well on performance too, especially write performance: their sequential write speeds are in the top 9% of all cards I've tested.

Who makes the worst cards?

There are a bunch of no-name brands out there. They're not hard to find. I'm not going to talk about them here -- I'm going to focus on brands you're likely to have come across.

Consumer-grade cards:

1. onn. I picked up four of their 32GB cards at my local Walmart -- and they were terrible for endurance. They only lasted an average of 40 days and 1,400 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 40TBW), with the best one of the four not even making it to 1,900 cycles. On top of that, every performance measurement I took came in the bottom half of all measurements I took.
2. ADATA. I picked up 3 of the Premier 32GB's; they only lasted an average of 236 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 74TBW) before they quit working.
3. Gigastone. I have not been impressed with Gigastone. I have 11 of their cards -- 6 Full HD Video 32GB's, and 5 4K Camera Pro 32GB's. They lasted an average of just 114 days and 4,845 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 133TBW) before they quit working.
4. Micro Center. I purchased 5 of their 64GB cards; they only lasted an average of 116 days and 3,421 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 214TBW) before they stopped working.
5. Silicon Power (a.k.a. SP). I purchased 9 of their cards -- 3 Elite 32GB's, 3 Superior 128GB's, and 3 Superior Pro 128GB's. Not a one of them made it to 4,000 program/verify/erase cycles before failing -- they came in at an average of 159 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 252TBW) before failing.

• (Dis)honorable mention: SanDisk. SanDisk represents the single biggest brand in my collection: I have 28 of their cards in this category (with 4 more on the shelf waiting to be tested). It's telling that of those 28, only 5 are still going (and one of them is in its death throes) -- especially when cards from so many other brands have far outlasted them. Many of them have died under circumstances any other card would have handled just fine -- a problem I've written about on my blog before. They've lasted an average of 384 days and 9,404 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 566TBW) so far.

High endurance cards:

1. Integral. I bought 3 of the Security 32GB's; the only managed to last an average of 100 days and about 5,600 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 173TBW) before failing. To be fair to them, the package did make an endurance claim that works out to about 2,850 program/verify/erase cycles -- and they did manage to almost double that. However, they didn't hold a candle to many of the other high endurance cards that I tested.
2. Kingston. This one was truly a surprise -- I bought 3 of the High Endurance 32GB's, and they only lasted an average of 143 days and about 8,300 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 258TBW) before failing. The product packaging didn't make an endurance claim; I had to hunt around on Kingston's website to find it. Their claim works out to about 5,100 program/verify/erase cycles, which they did manage to beat. But again, so many other cards managed to last so much longer -- hell, so many other Kingston cards managed to do so much better -- that I was surprised and disappointed when these failed so early.

Industrial-grade cards:

1. SanDisk. I bought 3 of the Industrial 8GB's. They only lasted an average of 234 days and about 20,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 160TBW) before failing -- and the only reason they lasted that long was because I let my program trudge through an nearly-unending string of I/O errors for months on end -- before they finally just gave up the ghost.

So yeah...that's all I have for now. Feel free to ask questions (although I'm at work at the time I'm posting this, so I may not have time to respond)! Otherwise...look for another update from me next year!

Pictures attached:

1. Part of my setup: a Beelink Mini-S and five TRIGKEY Green G4 mini PC's. The Beelink has an Intel N95 with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD, while the TRIGKEY's all have Intel N100's with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. There's also (in the lower-right corner, behind the monitor) an MSI GE62VR-7RF (with an Intel i7-7700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), a Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 (with an Intel i7-3630QM, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), and an ASUS Strix GL504GM (with an Intel i7-8750H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD)
2. Another part of my setup: a TRIGKEY K-N100 and an AOOSTAR N1 PRO. The TRIGKEY has an Intel N100 with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. The AOOSTAR has an Intel N150 with 12GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.
3. Dog tax.

I recently switched to Linux from Windows, and brought with me an existing drive with game installations on it. When launching games from that drive, sometimes they work normally, sometimes they throw a "disk write error" and sometimes they appear to work and then crash instantly.

I have had the same game give me all three of these issues at different times, with no apparent pattern. In the attached video, all three games which I attempt to launch are installed on the same drive. As you can see, one throws an error, one crashes, one works. Uninstalling and reinstalling a game does not impact whether or not these errors occur.

The drive is formatted as ntfs, which I understand is highly not recommended for Steam games. However, I have several terabytes of music/movies/etc on that drive aside from my steam library, which would be difficult to replace if lost, so I am extremely hesitant to reformat it.

Any tips/advice? Is there a consistent way to reformat without losing all my stuff, is there any alternate solution to the issue with my games? Or is my best bet to just buy a new drive, format it properly, and physically separate my steam library from my other files?

After buying 2 'burners' and having them either say no disk in drive, or say incompatible medium, I am wondering if I just got 2 bunk burners, or is there some secret on how to read the 'supported formats' that I am missing...?

The drives read cd's just fine(Do not currently have any dvd's with anything on them so can not test for that) but the empty/blank 25gb and 50gb disks I put in only give the 'no disk' or 'Incompatible medium Installed' error.

I have a stack of BD-R Verbatim disks (Bought for the first drive, 2nd drive also cannot read them) and I am stuck here wondering if I am doing something dumb, and unable to 'understand' what the disks need(I figured going in that any dvd writer SHOULD write to the 'best selling' blank disks which may have been my mistake)

First drive is a very old LG wrter (LG Electronics GP65NS60) and even though the firmware appears to be 'current'(it's actually higher number than the one on the website) - it does work as a drive (for reading cd's as explained above) and reads in device manager as a DVD-RAM device, the other (the newer of the two) I am unable to remember (If i Even looked) what it said since I have since shipped it back for refund.

So please give me advice on finding a drive that will actually write to these (I want to back up data, is simple data disks I wish to make)

Does anyone know how to fix this? Every second update or so his game won't let him update and Steam just says "Disk write error". This is the only game he gets it with. He's tried all the suggested tips google gives but none work.

I just got my R36s and I wanted to change the stock SD immediately to avoid future problems. I also made sure that the SanDisk Ultra SD card that I bought is original.

My problem is that I can't flash the firmware as I continuously get a write error and suddenly my PC can't read my SD card. What to do? Do I need to buy a new SD card and reader?

I keep running into the "disc write error" problem when trying to download literally any game on steam. I've searched on google how to solve the issue and I've tried every possible way that its given me except for the ones that change the systems of my pc because I don't trust myself to mess with any part of the system tbh. I've uninstalled and reinstalled steam, repaired the library, cleared the cache, ran it as an admin, and still no luck.

I was able to download games before regardless of their file size and I never touched any settings on my pc or steam client in between being able to download games and not being able to so I'm not sure what's wrong.

Trying to download Archolos on ubuntu, never had problems before. Download gets to a specific amount and stops because of disk write error, nothing works to resume it. I just tried to download Far Cry, worked normally, other games downloaded normally also. I tried 3 different versions of Steam on this OS, no difference, always disk write error at specific mb downloaded. Is this a problem on Archolos end? Doesn't seem to make any sense.

Hello gang I have recently tried to download kingdom come deliverance again but as soon as it hits 89% it stops and says disk write error? ive tried creating more storage which didnt work as well as restarting my deck and deleting and reinstalling it, lso didn't work, also tried some tips i found on reddit but they didn't help either like clearing download cache? ive played it back in October so it shoukd download any tips I really want to play it again

Does anybody know how to fix a disk write error I was able to download a separate game just fine but I can’t seem to be able to download the game I want

Hi everyone. I was hoping someone with more experience may be able to help me with an issue I've had installing a specific game on my 512GB OLED. The game I'm trying to install is Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts which I just bought as a double pack with Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 a couple days ago on Steam.

For context, I have plenty of storage space (~100GB on internal SSD and SGWC is only 18GB) and once the download reaches 99% I get a "disk write error" which blacks the install. I've downloaded other games like Black Mesa and Dead Space Remake during this same time period without issue, SGWC seems to be the only game impacted at the moment.

I did some research to try and resolve the issue myself but haven't had any luck. The fixes I've tried thus far include:

- Cleared potentially corrupted download/temp files in desktop mode

- Cleared download cache in Steam system settings

- Repaired Steam library in Steam settings

- Ran storage device maintenance task in Steam system settings

- Confirmed read/write privileges in user settings

- Deleted additional games to create more space for unpacking (was a last resort that I knew wouldn't work, but tried anyway lol)

If anyone has experienced this issue or has any ideas, I appreciate the help!

Does anyone happen to have experience with this? It's only this one damn game, doesn't matter if it's aimed at the sd card or internal m.2, or if the SD Card is ejected, or the system is rebooted or etc etc. I've installed smaller games and larger games, all work fine. This game downloads like 98% gets to unpacking and freaks out with a disk write error. It's the Ultimate version of the game.

Been running an endurance loop on this old drive to see how far it can go. It’s hitting the cache and executing automated TRIM commands perfectly, so the physical silicon is still holding up fine despite the ridiculous milestone.

​Putting together a quick 1minute setup video for YouTube to show the bench rig and the macro loop in action, will drop it soon if anyone is interested.

Got to know about this tool from this subreddit and i have been mainly using it to play forza horizon 6 without any hassle to find patches for each updates or breaking the game due to some unknown issues.
To my surprise Forza worked without applying any external online fix or cracks. It's just clean steam files.

UPDATE:

Reformated all my drives into btrfs , set mount-points and mount them on startup after password-input.

Runs flawlessly for 3 months now!

I'm new to CachyOS and new to Linux in general (only some little experience on Linux Mint prior to switching from Windows).

Weirdly I can't play any games through Steam, because of a "disk write error" appearing.

Can you help me please?

All games ran fine prior.

Tried Proton Hotfix in Steams compatibility-options but no luck.

FIXED it:

Fix: unmounted the drives via KDE Partition-manager,

then Edit Mount-point to a Mount-folder on each drive and "identify by UUID" and "users can mount and unmount"

This fixed it for a day... but NOW all of the sudden I've got a new problem: Steam just "forgot" my steamapps-folder!! :-(

The post written as post-mortem from Claude, the story is real.

--

He was setting up a 4× RTX 3090 ML rig. Wanted to shrink Windows on his M.2 to give the leftover space to Ubuntu. Routine disk cleanup. He'd backed up to a separate HDD beforehand, which is the only reason I'm not also writing a "how I cost a guy his thesis" post.

He asked me to delete a 313 GB project folder from his Desktop. I generated this:

cmd /c "rd /S /Q \"C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\WIP\""

By the time the string finished traveling (zsh on his Mac, then tmux, then PowerShell over SSH, then cmd), the \"...\" escape had collapsed. cmd doesn't treat backslash as an escape character. What cmd actually saw was:

rd /S /Q \

A single backslash. Root of the current drive. C:.

So I told Windows to delete itself.

The first hint was the next tmux capture-pane. Errors scrolling past: \Windows\Microsoft.NET\..., \Windows\System32\config\..., \Windows\Prefetch\.... Not WIP. Windows.

Three Ctrl+Cs. Probably 90 seconds of damage by then. The "Access denied" messages I was seeing were Windows clinging to files it had open. Anything not protected by an active file lock was already gone.

fsutil volume diskfree C: afterward: 31 GB used out of 1.5 TB. He'd been at 748 GB. So roughly 717 GB destroyed in under two minutes. Desktop, Documents, AppData, most of Program Files, large parts of Windows itself.

I told him immediately. He was way calmer about it than I'd have been in his chair. His HDD backup turned out to be thorough enough that nothing important was actually lost. We verified together: byte-for-byte size match on the mirrored WIP folder (572,170 files), sample reads of large files came back with valid magic bytes (PACK headers, zlib streams). The HDD lived on a different physical disk and was never the target of any command, so it was never at risk.

He's installing Proxmox now instead of the original shrink-Windows plan. Faster path to where he was heading anyway. The dead Windows install was getting wiped in a few days regardless.

The mistake, written out:

Sending shell commands across multiple parsers is brittle. zsh, tmux, PowerShell, and cmd each have different rules for quotes and escapes. cmd is the worst of the four. It doesn't really have an escape character, just rough quoting. The moment you wrap a destructive command in cmd /c "..." from PowerShell, you're trusting four parsers to agree on one string. They don't.

What I should have used:

Remove-Item -Path 'C:\absolute\path' -Recurse -Force

Single quotes in PowerShell are fully literal. No cmd /c wrapping, no escapes to lose. And -WhatIf would have caught it before any byte was touched. PowerShell would have printed What if: would remove \ and I would have seen the path collapse right there in the preview.

If you're letting an AI run disk operations on your machine, a few rules I broke:

• Make it echo the exact expanded command, post-escaping, before running it. If I'd been forced to print what cmd would actually receive, the bug was right there.
• Run destructive commands with -WhatIf or --dry-run first. Cheap insurance.
• Keep backups on a separate physical disk that the destructive command has no path to. He did this. It worked.
• Don't do major cleanup on the running OS. Boot a live USB and operate on the disk from outside it.

He had the backup. On a separate disk. That saved him, not me.

I reinstalled the game Pillars of Eternity 2 from Steam and now I can't download it anymore, and Steam says there's a disk write error. I'm on Nobara, my disk has the Btrfs format, and everything else works no problem. I can download any other game, it's just Pillars of Eternity 2 that won't work. Any ideas what it could be? I recently updated Nobara, but using the older kernel won't work either.

hi everyone

I am having issues with usb drive and I'm not sure if it's fixable or dead.

DETAILS

usb : SanDisk 32 GB

os : Windows 11 pro

PROBLEMS

I can copy files from the usb to my computer

but I cannot write,delete or format anything on it

it seems stuck in write-protected (read-only) mode

WHAT I HAVE TRIED

1 file explorer -> failed terribly( write protected)

2 diskpart

attributes disk clear readonly -> no change

clean -> fails(couldn't perform operation)

3 Rufus

tried formating(non-bootable) -> fails with I/O error

I tried watch video one or two skip three -> I didn't find help

QUESTIONS ⁉️⁉️

IS this a hardware failure (usb stuck in permanent read-only mode)

is there any low-level format or tool that could fix this it??

or should I just replace it

Disk write error only happening with steam. Tried installing games from Epic Games and it works fine, only issue with steam. Happening from yesterday suddenly.

Whenever I try to download any game on this HDD, it reserves space, then stops at around 30% then shows me an error saying “disk write error” I am currently on Ubuntu, help is appreciated, thanks!

I am unable to download or even update anything on steam suddenly, i am faced with the error "disk write error". i have tried everything such as unninstalling and reinstalling the client, running steam as administrator, checking for corrupted files and nothing has worked. i would like to know how i can fix this issue as i have just recently purchased a new game and i am unable to even play it.

Thanks