Help Note 3 corrupting my micro SD cards?

[Android Question]

So I'm fairly certain it is my phone causing my problems, not the cards themselves.

I bought a cheap (keyword 'cheap') generic 128g microSD for my Note 3. The other card was maxed out and I thought it was about time to get a bigger one. Since I inserted the thing it's been nothing but trouble. I can get info on the card, but some files become corrupt over a short period of time (a day), and some don't even show up as valid in the first place, which they for sure are. Music files specifically have a hard time syncing (I use iSyncr because I have really high-quality music files), and some enter the SD card as corrupt. The phone nor computer can access some files, but around 40% of the files stand unscathed.

So I started to play with formatting. I tried both options available (from right clicking the SD card in the compy), mounted it to my phone, synced data, etc to no avail. I was careful to eject device, unmount, etc. One thing that I recently noticed is that no option for FAT32 is available?? Perhaps there is another way.

Okay, so the obvious answer was I bought a crap SD card. Not a biggie. I recently bought a Samsung SD card, and still had problems. In fact, the phone couldn't even access the thing, it just wanted to format it, which failed every time. Computer showed no issues with the card, but I was luckily able to return it.

Naturally, when I got the new SD card, I misplaced the old one which worked, so I'm going to turn the house upside-down to find it but in the meantime maybe one of you know an easier fix. To be clear, unless I find the old one, I only have a single microSD card which is the generic 128g.

- Maybe I can reinstall a program/update, or install an app?
- Formatting issues? How to format FAT32 without the option being available by rclicking?

At this point, I'm not fully convinced the card itself doesn't work; I just think there's some miscommunication between the phone and itself.

Ideas?

 

[Hadron]

Where are you buying cards from? It might be worth checking that the cards are what they claim they are (especially if you get them from eBay sellers or similar - there are so many fakes on eBay that I'd simply never consider it). A "fake" card claims it has a high capacity but is really much smaller, and could produce symptoms like your first card suffered. H2testw is usually recommended for testing the real capacity of cards, but there is a page here with a few options you could use. I'd do that before anything else, since if it does turn out to be a fake anything else would be a waste of time.

 

[saltire]

There's a handy wee utility called SD Insight from Play store you can download to check details of cards eg manufacturer, capacity etc as well - if it's actually recognised in your device of course. Plus for formatting, I'm never that confident in using Windows to format cards and tend to use the SD Assoc's formatter from here instead:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/index.html

Either that or Gparted via VMWare if I can be bothered

 

[wessbl]

Where are you buying cards from? It might be worth checking that the cards are what they claim they are (especially if you get them from eBay sellers or similar - there are so many fakes on eBay that I'd simply never consider it). A "fake" card claims it has a high capacity but is really much smaller, and could produce symptoms like your first card suffered. H2testw is usually recommended for testing the real capacity of cards, but there is a page here with a few options you could use. I'd do that before anything else, since if it does turn out to be a fake anything else would be a waste of time.

Hey, OP here. I did buy it from eBay but I know my way around the site. The card absolutely has 124 gigs of memory - the first thing I did when I got it was to sync a whole bunch of junk on it and make sure it worked (all the movies and tv shows played just fine). It's once I plug it into my phone that I have issues :/

 

[wessbl]

There's a handy wee utility called SD Insight from Play store you can download to check details of cards eg manufacturer, capacity etc as well - if it's actually recognised in your device of course. Plus for formatting, I'm never that confident in using Windows to format cards and tend to use the SD Assoc's formatter from here instead:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/index.html

Either that or Gparted via VMWare if I can be bothered

OP here (just opened an acct).
I tried that, and it worked okay but the only issue is that the program just used the default format, it gave me no options as to what kind of format I wanted to use. It did an exFAT.
To be a lil more specific, other places I've read up on have said that other formats don't work as well as FAT32, which is why I'm trying so hard to get this card in that format.

 

[wessbl]

OP here.
Found my old trusty 32 gig. It was in FAT32 format, as suspected. However, it doesn't have nearly enough memory on it, so how else can I get my phone to work with the new memory card (as I still suspect there are no issues)?

Here are some thoughts:
- Find a way to format FAT32 on a 128 gig microSD.
- Figure out why my phone is tinkering with the exFAT format (since my computer is chill with it).

Thanks for the replies!

 

[Hadron]

I just did a quick web search and the Note 3 should indeed support exFAT format cards.

I think you can format larger drives to fat32 using the DOS command line (a quick google came up with this link), but Windows isn't really my thing.