Surface Pro microSD card unmounts after waking up from sleep

Anonymous
2013-03-01T00:26:48+00:00

Hi,

I've recently bought Surface Pro along with a 64 GB sd card. I've noticed that after a long sleep period, the SD card unmounts itself and I can no longer find it under explorer. I need to remove and reinsert it before Windows detects the card again. This doesn't happen if I wake up the device shortly after putting it to sleep, only after a few hours. I wouldn't mind it as much if I didn't have to set up Skydrive again after reinserting. I think it might have something to do with s3 sleep, and might be a driver/software error, but I'm not entirely sure. Any ideas?

Surface | Surface Pro | Install and update

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Anonymous
2014-07-22T16:48:29+00:00

I finally solved this problem by enabled write-caching for the SD card.  My card no longer unmounts unexpectedly when changing power modes.  I realize this comes with some risk of possible data loss if the card is not ejected properly.

  1. I right-clicked on the SD card device in device manager under Disk Drives.
  2. Then clicked properties
  3. Then went to the policies tab
  4. And then selected "best performance"

So far, no unexpected dismounts and no data corruption.  This has also improved the performance of the device as reads and writes of large files seem to be much smoother now.

My theory is that this setting is preventing the slot from powering down while in a hibernated or suspended state.

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Anonymous
2014-02-06T04:56:51+00:00

Hello Ted

Check out my other post here

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro2-surfdevice/micro-sd-slot-no-longer-recognized-in-the-surface/2705d99f-440a-41a4-9bdf-965f1b092efd

Eventually I changed the card same make/ model, formatted it as NTFS and so far have had no issues at all...........and its been almost 2 months now.

I think Scandisk have issues with quality control ?

Try a full format on NTFS , it does take sometime

If it still has issues after that I would use the card in your phone or something else and by another one brand new for the slate.

It worked for me.

I guess we will get the same issues when the 128GB MSD card comes out!

Good luck

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Anonymous
2015-07-17T20:46:00+00:00

Simply change the driver to generic USB mass storage.

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-03-26T14:38:29+00:00

    I have no problems with mine it's a SanDisk 64GB, class 10:

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009QZH6JS/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

    I did have a problem with it in my old usb 2 card reader on my desktop and had to reformat it once in the Surface pro (always use exFat on these), sleep, reset, low power states-- it never fails to be ready.  Its pretty slow on writes of large video files although twice as fast as the class 4 I first tried and thankfully lost.  I forgot you all have reformatted these right?

    Yes, I've reformatted mine to NTFS (that's required to have a VHD on it), and I think the OP probably has too at this point.

    That' also the exact same card I have (your link).  To the OP, if yours is still dismounting, it might point to either a bad card or (knock on wood that its not) a bad card slot or controller on your Surface.

    Once I got my 'automount' task set up right per the Reddit link (they missed a couple steps like configuring the task for Win 8 vs. the default that comes up as W7 or something like that) I've never had mine fail to be recognized and automount the included VHD at startup. 

    Mine is also pretty slow on writes to it.  I plugged in a USB3 32-GB thumbdrive with 3-4 movies on it one day (just DVD rips, not BD) and copied them onto it.  The little graphic you can get now with large copies started out in the insane 4-5 MB/sec type level, but quickly levelled off to about 1-2MB/s and the overall write of about 20something GB took about 45 minutes, which was kind of disappointing.   Part of that delay is the VHD being a 'dynamic' sized file though, that has to keep expanding as stuff is written into it.  I didn't want to risk forcing it to be 'fixed' size and then if you lose a bit of the memory on the chip the whole virtual volume might go kaput.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-03-26T20:07:59+00:00

    It's well known that these cards often have odd problems if formatted with anything but exFAT, glad you found a work around.

    An 8GB xfer from USB 3.0 stick (most in four files) takes about 15min so that is about the same speed as you get, not thrilling but ok for stuff that's mostly read, but I have a hard time imagining using a 1TB version of these cards except perhaps as a WORM video archieve...hopefully say by the time the Pro 3 comes along we will have 1TB SSD and these cards will be relegated to transfering data from old cameras.  The USB 3.0 stick is about 2.5 times faster on writes I just wish it didn't stick out the side so far :).

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