Hi at all,

it is a well known fact (at least since Samsung's infamous 840 EVO scandal) that data on NAND is volatile. That means it gets harder for a controller to read "old" data.
That is the case for our SD cards in nintendo switch consoles. Last year in October 2022 I bought a large 512GB SanDisk Ultra card (NO FAKE) for 40 bucks. It worked well. Until I updated Mario Kart 8 to its last update a few days ago and was astonished by the long track loading times (40 secs). On my other switch (512GB Samsung drive) there was 9 second loading.
So I switched cards to make sure it was not the SD reader or something else. Same result. Then I refreshed the data on the faulty card (DiskFresh freeware tool by Pugan Software). Of course you can copy your data, then quick format and paste your data back which has the exact same effect: Every sector is written again.
It took me a whole day to refresh the sectors. After that the card was as fast as usual. It maxes out the switch's SD reader for sure. Since I have come by several threads complaining about slow SD cards and those being fake... this is NOT always the case as shown here. simply refresh your data once in a while and it restores your SD card speeds to maximum.

tl;dr:

Not only things in your refrigerator get old as time goes by. DATA GETS OLD AND SLOW. Please refresh your data once in a while. Since we all install our games once and never write data to that spot ever again, it gets slow over time. This is not a huge deal for SSDs (SATA or Nvme, since those have firmware which handle refreshing data accordingly). But SD cards are dumb and the switch obviously does not manage data to keep it fresh.


Best wishes!

 

[mathew77]

refresh your data once in a while

How often, for example?..

 

[naddel81]

How often, for example?..

That is a great question and subject to a planned update to my article above.
I know for a fact now that 1 year was too much for my 512GB SanDisk Ultra, because Mario Kart 8 was one of the games I installed back a year ago and it was crawling a few days ago. loading title screen and races was about 4 times slower than on my refreshed card.
Will try again in 6 months and benchmark again,
Currently I have no clue how to check how old data on the SD card is (I know windows file explorer dates, but they are not reliable).

Right now I am interested in exactly those two thoughts:

1. how to determine how old a sector data really is and
2. where is the threshold (age here) where I should refresh data in order to make it easier for the controller to read it. ==> how old is too old?

 

[DinohScene]

I have plenty of old SD cards with data that is years old.
Shit still works fine and as speedy as the day I put it on there.

Just get a good reliable branded SD card and backup your data.
Nothing much to worry about if you keep backups.

 

[Hayato213]

That is a great question and subject to a planned update to my article above.
I know for a fact now that 1 year was too much for my 512GB SanDisk Ultra, because Mario Kart 8 was one of the games I installed back a year ago and it was crawling a few days ago. loading title screen and races was about 4 times slower than on my refreshed card.
Will try again in 6 months and benchmark again,
Currently I have no clue how to check how old data on the SD card is (I know windows file explorer dates, but they are not reliable).

Right now I am interested in exactly those two thoughts:

1. how to determine how old a sector data really is and
2. where is the threshold (age here) where I should refresh data in order to make it easier for the controller to read it. ==> how old is too old?

Data are just data, Im a more curious if you ever tested the card with H2testw before use.

 

[H1B1Esquire]

I recommend using a backup drive (got a 2tb HDD from eBay for $30 with a three-year warranty) because data can become corrupted randomly on “quality” SD cards. It can take a week or four years, regardless of how often you play.
If you used the “T-foil”, I suggest dumping the data to a backup.


As for SD cards in general, class 10 V3 is generally good enough for Switch, even a cheap 64gb Onn. At $8.98, buy a few so you aren’t left in the cold/have something to do while you copy your “library” to an external HDD.

 

[MaD_mAnIaC]

if you use a decent memory card you can trim them using linux, just as you do with ssd's. both my sandisk cards trim sucessfully with fstrim, takes 3minutes or so for my 512gb card and speed is restored after. usb card readers usually don't pass the trim command, you might need a laptop with a builtin card reader. i also notice that if i don't keep at least 10% free space on the card, i have to trim them more frequently...

 

[naddel81]

Data are just data, Im a more curious if you ever tested the card with H2testw before use.

yes, card is totally fine. you obviously have not heard about Samsung Evo 840 which started the whole "what? SSD data is not forever" discussion to begin with. at least for end consumers.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

I have plenty of old SD cards with data that is years old.
Shit still works fine and as speedy as the day I put it on there.

Just get a good reliable branded SD card and backup your data.
Nothing much to worry about if you keep backups.

Nah, it is not as easy as you say. I wish it was. I have only brand cards, no fakes. I test them all with h2testw. And it is a scientifically proven fact that data on NAND is NOT forever. if you try to read your oldest (written!) data, you will be astonished.
it is NOT about the age of your cards, you are getting things wrong here. it is about how old data on these NAND cells is.
Wii U just showed the same problem a few months ago by "forgetting" data on its NAND. it is the same for every NAND out there.

 

[linuxares]

Isn't the Evo 840 issue old and fixed? Or was it some other Evo issue?

 

[naddel81]

I recommend using a backup drive (got a 2tb HDD from eBay for $30 with a three-year warranty) because data can become corrupted randomly on “quality” SD cards. It can take a week or four years, regardless of how often you play.
If you used the “T-foil”, I suggest dumping the data to a backup.


As for SD cards in general, class 10 V3 is generally good enough for Switch, even a cheap 64gb Onn. At $8.98, buy a few so you aren’t left in the cold/have something to do while you copy your “library” to an external HDD.

of course I have plenty of backups. that is not the problem here. all my cards max out the corresponding interfaces/readers because I hate bottlenecks. and it is not about corruption either, which will happen regardless of what technology you use. even HDDs can get corruption (bit rot) as time goes by.
this case here is just about NAND controllers not being able to read the gates/sectors properly when the data is too old. that has a simple physical reason and is fixed by simply re-newing the data. that is the whole reason "diskFresh" by Pugan exists.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

Isn't the Evo 840 issue old and fixed? Or was it some other Evo issue?

no, it was the 840 EVO. and it cannot be "fixed". they (samsung) simply wrote a firmware (they needed two tries!) to tell the controller to refresh old data before it becomes slow. that wears out the drives, of course because NAND only has so much write cycles. but they went that route because consumers complained about slow SSDs, which is a paradox in itself.
today ALL SSD controllers do some kind of wear leveling, trim and refreshing data. the send those electrons around in order to keep the NAND fresh. that also "harms" lifetime of your product. but since manufacturers want to sell new drives and you won't keep your old 32GB SSD from 2003 forever, that effect is not going to annoy you as much as slow data on your (once fast) drive.

same thing I noticed yesterday with my 13 months old data (mario kart 8 deluxe) on a (back then) brand new SanDisk Ultra 512GB microSDXC card.

 

[sley]

On flash storage it depends on how much data changes on the same blocks in the filesystem, my SD Card from 2017 and the one I bought from 2023 are almost identical. It seems that you were very unlucky if it just wasn't data corruption

 

[naddel81]

On flash storage it depends on how much data changes on the same blocks in the filesystem, my SD Card from 2017 and the one I bought from 2023 are almost identical. It seems that you were very unlucky if it just wasn't data corruption

you are getting things wrong. it is not about the age of the SD cards. it is about the data on them. if data is old, it becomes slow.
just test reading it completely and you will see.

 

[DinohScene]

yes, card is totally fine. you obviously have not heard about Samsung Evo 840 which started the whole "what? SSD data is not forever" discussion to begin with. at least for end consumers.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

Nah, it is not as easy as you say. I wish it was. I have only brand cards, no fakes. I test them all with h2testw. And it is a scientifically proven fact that data on NAND is NOT forever. if you try to read your oldest (written!) data, you will be astonished.
it is NOT about the age of your cards, you are getting things wrong here. it is about how old data on these NAND cells is.
Wii U just showed the same problem a few months ago by "forgetting" data on its NAND. it is the same for every NAND out there.

I literally just checked a Sandisk SD card I have, bought in 2008, data written in 2008-2009.
0 errors, all the data is still fine.
Card hasn't seen a power input since 2012, MAYBE 2013.

Again, keep backups.
If one keeps backups, data rot shouldn't be an issue.

 

[linuxares]

They should hold data for a while, but depending on quality of components they can of course lose said data.

 

[Hayato213]

yes, card is totally fine. you obviously have not heard about Samsung Evo 840 which started the whole "what? SSD data is not forever" discussion to begin with. at least for end consumers.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

Nah, it is not as easy as you say. I wish it was. I have only brand cards, no fakes. I test them all with h2testw. And it is a scientifically proven fact that data on NAND is NOT forever. if you try to read your oldest (written!) data, you will be astonished.
it is NOT about the age of your cards, you are getting things wrong here. it is about how old data on these NAND cells is.
Wii U just showed the same problem a few months ago by "forgetting" data on its NAND. it is the same for every NAND out there.

But what does the Evo 840 have to do with your SD card, that has nothing to do with your switch not able to boot fusee.bin problem that you were having the other day.

 

[naddel81]

But what does the Evo 840 have to do with your SD card, that has nothing to do with your switch not able to boot fusee.bin problem that you were having the other day.

no, that was another system and has nothing to do with the topic. Evo 840 is the same technology the switch uses. and SD cards, too. it is all NAND Flash memory.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

I literally just checked a Sandisk SD card I have, bought in 2008, data written in 2008-2009.
0 errors, all the data is still fine.
Card hasn't seen a power input since 2012, MAYBE 2013.

Again, keep backups.
If one keeps backups, data rot shouldn't be an issue.

It has never been about "errors". It is about the data being read slower because of degradation in the gates. they cannot hold charge forever and become more difficult to read. data rot is another topic.

Post automatically merged: Nov 16, 2023

there is way more than this:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power

 

[The Catboy]

I have plenty of old SD cards with data that is years old.
Shit still works fine and as speedy as the day I put it on there.

Just get a good reliable branded SD card and backup your data.
Nothing much to worry about if you keep backups.

This
I've had the same 32GB microSD in my Supercard DSTWO for literal years now and haven't had any issues. My last microSD to have any issues was a first-generation 16GB which cost me 80$ when it was new. I might add, I def played a part in that thing's demise since I used to run my Raspberry Pi and everything else.

 

[naddel81]

This
I've had the same 32GB microSD in my Supercard DSTWO for literal years now and haven't had any issues. My last microSD to have any issues was a first-generation 16GB which cost me 80$ when it was new. I might add, I def played a part in that thing's demise since I used to run my Raspberry Pi and everything else.

I should have added: you might NOT notice the degradation in speed when you are not using it to its full potential. since DS games are only a few MB small, there is no way you will see loading speed increase as significant as on switch (or at all). on switch there are huge amounts of data that are being loaded. take zelda for example. you have to load gigabytes of data into memory (RAM) when loading the map and assets first time. you will definitely see a difference between a fresh install and an install that was done over a year ago.

 

[sley]

you are getting things wrong. it is not about the age of the SD cards. it is about the data on them. if data is old, it becomes slow.
just test reading it completely and you will see.

I misunderstood then sorry, personally I never heard of something like that. Not saying you're wrong or anything but I sadly don't have cards to test this

 

[zamastyle]

This is a very dramatic reaction to an uncommon issue.