SD card from ancient times

[Igor]

During spring cleaning I found Nokia 128Mb SD card and I could not resist to make the standard test ... which took around one hour to finish  

 

 

 

I expect worse.

 

Spoiler

 Command line used: iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
        Output is in kBytes/sec
        Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
        Processor cache size set to 1024 kBytes.
        Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
        File stride size set to 17 * record size.
                                                              random    random
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4     2612     2621     4559     4563     3197       48                                                          
          102400      16     2598     2592     6645     6622     5809      201                                                          
          102400     512     2538     2594     7615     7615     7579     1825                                                          
          102400    1024     2541     2601     7641     7646     7628     2142                                                          
          102400   16384     2537     2608     7694     7696     7694     2586                                                          

 

 

[martinayotte]

That makes me remembering when I purchased my first digital camera : 1Mpix per picture, 32MB FullSD. cost me $1000 ...

 

[hojnikb]

I think i still have 32MB MMC card lying around somewhere 

As far as i recall, it was very slow even at the time

[manuti]

On 7/4/2017 at 10:43 PM, hojnikb said:

32MB

See your 32 and go down to 16MB

 

[technik007_cz]

On 07/04/2017 at 6:38 PM, Igor said:

During spring cleaning I found Nokia 128Mb SD card

I needed small sized cards for nfs boot. I ordered 10pcs of them on Aliexpress and received exactly same ones (Nokia 128MB) probably ripped off old phones :-).

1 could not initialize but rest of them passed badblock test (I received refund for bad piece without any problem).

 

Than I ordered cheaper ones, 10 pcs again. I got new cards with orange/white colour.

1 could not innitialize => rubbish

2 did not pass test in external but passed test in internal reader => ??rubbish

2 did not pass neither in external or internal reader => rubbish

 

So keep this card :-) it still has value.

[tkaiser]

10 minutes ago, technik007_cz said:

badblock test

 

Better use F3 or H2testw instead: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-prepare-a-sd-card

 

Badblocks semantics are pretty useless on flash media implementing FTL (flash translation layer) since there's no real mapping between physical flash cells and logical blocks. F3 or H2testw do a better job here and sellers usually accept their logs/screenshots to get a refund/replacement. BTW: both tools reports writing and reading speeds which is also interesting since some flash media do 60MB/s fine... but just for a couple of minutes and then slow down. Another good reason to get a refund/replacement!

 

And here is a related but rather lenghty discussion regarding SD card 'problems' (that are on some platforms often caused by the other standard SBC problem: underpowering, especially Raspberries a few years ago suffered from SD card corruption related to undervoltage): http://tech.scargill.net/a-question-of-lifespan/

[technik007_cz]

9 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Better use F3 or H2testw instead:

I run test on debian distro at this moment. (I can switch on windows but only if it is question of life or die).

Thank you for keeping me updated I gonna try f3.

[technik007_cz]

@tkaiser

I tested 10pcs of 128MB sized and there is result.

I needed insert card in and just only press enter in opened terminal screen (with command ready like badblocks -wsv /dev/mmcblk0), replace card and press again until no more cards left.

Badblocks found 5 cards with errors and i decided just for case test good ones with f3.

I must mount card, change directory, write test data, unmount, unplug it, plug it again. (I tried test on cards marked bad by badblocks and sometimes it did not find error without replugging it !!!)

and make same procedure .. mount card, change directory and run reading test of  previously data.

And result of f3 test on "badblocks" cards marked ok? F3 did not find any error.

 

Sorry F3 is not user friendly and I am definitely staying with "badblocks -wsv" which is easier to operate for me.

[tkaiser]

1 hour ago, technik007_cz said:

Sorry F3 is not user friendly and I am definitely staying with "badblocks -wsv" which is easier to operate for me

Well, you're free to do whatever you want, even fooling yourself

 

For anyone else who stumbles accross this: badblocks is absolutely useless when it's about flash media you bought recently (SD cards, SSDs, USB thumb drives and so on). If you bought really cheap old crap cards somewhere it might blame them correctly as bad but it it's not possible to check for the real problems we face with SD cards today: Checking fraud/counterfeit cards: http://www.happybison.com/reviews/how-to-check-and-spot-fake-micro-sd-card-8/

 

This is only possible by writing random data patterns to the card and then read all of them back. Takes some time but it's strongly recommended to test immediately with every flash based media you buy. H2testw is easy to use on Windows, F3 is easy to use within Armbian (we automated that for you so in case you forgot to check your card directly after purchase just let 'armbianmonitor -c $HOME' run)

 

Again: badblocks works fine with spinning rust but is absolutely useless to check flash based media: http://git.net/ml/zfs-discuss/2014-10/msg00312.html

 

The underlying technology has to be considered and then certain tools/strategies that worked fine for decades are of no use any more. Same for example with 'RAID 1' many people seem to love. Useful with HDDs, not that much with SD cards and an attempt to fool yourself when done with 2 SSD of same type.