MicroSD card randomly unmounts itself

Anonymous
2015-05-29T17:26:43+00:00

I inserted a Samsung EVo 128GB micros-SD card into my new Surface 3, intending to use it as photo storage for my photography workflow.

However, after a fee minutes - even without using it - the drive appears to unmounts itself. It's still visible in Explorer, but clicking it results in Explorer hanging and eventually giving the error "please insert a disk" after several minutes. In Disk Manager, the drive sometimes appears, with the correct amount of space, but indicates it's all unallocated.

This issue is fixed temporarily by removing and reinserting the disk, but a short time later it unmounts itself again. I tried the disk in my older Dell Venue 8 Pro, but the issue didn't occur there.

I've looked at previous threads about similar issues on older and Pro models, and tried setting the policy for the microSD drive to 'better performance' and even tried setting up a VHD, but none of these provided a solution.

Does anyone know what I can do?

Surface | Other

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 No comments

56 answers

Sort by: Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2015-07-30T23:33:24+00:00

    I had a PNY 128GB that would unmount at sleep every time. I replaced it with a SanDisk 128GB that (so far after 4 days) has not unmounted. SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A. Reasonable R/W speed. (I tried all kinds of "fixes" with the PNY - adding layers of tape, etc. all to no avail.) YMMV.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2015-07-31T14:08:03+00:00

    I have updated to Windows 10 and my Lexar 128 card still unmounts. Never had problems with the 64 cards.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-02T20:15:18+00:00

    Hi all,

    I recently bought a surface 3, upgraded to windows 10 and bought this micro sd card to expand the storage:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexar-Professional-128GB-MicroSDXC-Memory/dp/B00NPSZ42I/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1438546177&sr=8-7&keywords=128gb+microsd

    The problem I get is that when it is in the surface 3 micro sd slot it disconnects ANY time I put it under load, i.e. install games to it, try to run crystal disk on it etc. The annoying thing is if I use a USB 3 sd card adapter with the surface 3 I get no issues at all. I've tried formatting it as NTFS and exFat, both seemed to perform the same way, and I get this error:

    I know it's not a physical connection issue because the card is there on restart, but it will disconnect if I try to put it under load again. I've tried disabling/uninstalling the drive to repair it in device manager but with no luck, same with enabling write caching. It also seems to suffer much worse read speeds when I put it in the sd card slot, 40MB per sec reads in the micro sd slot versus 70+ in the USB3 adapter.

    Does anybody else have similar issues? It feels very much like the sd card slot on my surface 3 is broken and it's less than 2 weeks old :(

    Thanks everybody.

    Edwin.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2015-08-03T18:16:25+00:00

    Sorry to hear that your card is not mounting after the upgrade. Have you installed all the updates?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  5. Anonymous
    2015-08-03T20:19:17+00:00

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments