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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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.

Was this answer helpful?

3 people found this answer helpful.
0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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

Was this answer helpful?

1 person found this answer helpful.
0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
2015-07-17T20:46:00+00:00

Simply change the driver to generic USB mass storage.

Was this answer helpful?

0 comments

78 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2015-03-03T14:40:40+00:00

    I have have or have had Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 2 and RT devices that do not have this problem, as well as devices that have had it. If you want the problem to go away, in my experience your best recourse is to exchange the entire unit. Worked for me, now 100% problem free.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2015-03-03T12:08:21+00:00

    I'll check out the logs for this error as you mentioned.

    In my case, it simply does not re-mount the card even correctly or looses it during operation with a maximum performance setting while typing and using the drive.  I had the drive re-assigned as drive M: as this allows me to use the uSD card on any computer always with the same drive path setup.  The surface just decides to re-mount it under operating conditions as D: or in this case, just does not bother to re-mount until I eject and re-insert.  I'll will go through the records/logs to verify.

    I just wanted a way to determine if it was the SD card and be able to use the surface in between.  the USB card reader solved all those problems including waking from sleep works fine.  It was not why I bought the surface though - I bought it as a field computer so I would not have to use the USB, but the microSD instead and have no ports where employees can leave something connected and rip out the jacks.  The whole intent was to have multiple surfaces and plug in the SD card with everything preprogramed which basically went bust.

    I have as of yet not tried without the surface cover attached.  I will try this next.

    Apparently the surface 3 is having similar issues.

    I have since tried my microSD cards in an Asus, Dell and HP where they did not have this issue at all after running for 6 hours.  No random un-mounts during operation.  From sleep they showed the correct drive letter as well.  They were all windows 8.1 pro machines.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments