Some SD Cards Not Working Properly With 2021 14 and 16-Inch MacBook Pros

[jlocker]

I'm confused as to what your point is. The new Macs are superior to the Intel Macs in pretty much every way. Even with a faulty SD slot they're more capable of data throughput and have more charging options. It's not even close.


So it sounds like you're not happy with a Mac because you don't need a Mac. There's nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't mean the new machines aren't a massive step up from the 2019 ones.

I would agree, I really don't need a Mac any longer now that Apple has taken away about 65% of the usefulness of the Mac hardware and software over the years.

1. BootCamp gone with Windows support.
2. Upgrade Ram capability, for lower cost.
3. Upgrade internal storage for use of Apps and data for lower cost.
4. AAA games.
5. Upgrade a video card from Nvidia, taken away from Apple.
6. expansion slots.

And other things, I don't need a large screen iPhone.

Can I run Photoshop and Video editing on other platforms, yes and at a lower cost.

 

[boss.king]

I would agree, I really don't need a Mac any longer now that Apple has taken away about 65% of the usefulness of the Mac hardware and software over the years.

1. BootCamp gone with Windows support.
2. Upgrade Ram capability, for lower cost.
3. Upgrade internal storage for use of Apps and data for lower cost.
4. AAA games.
5. Upgrade a video card from Nvidia, taken away from Apple.
6. expansion slots.

And other things, I don't need a large screen iPhone.

Can I run Photoshop and Video editing on other platforms, yes and at a lower cost.

Okay? Most of these aren't new to the M1 Macs though, they've been the way their laptops have been since roughly 2012.

 

[hot-gril]

Same here. I use it with CCC as an on the go always there backup; although that may shorten the SD card's life. My playing with the RaspberryPi indicates SD cards don't do well when used like an SSD.

Yes, besides the wear, it's very slow for random writes. I used it with Time Machine for a while, and it still worked, but I needed the extra storage for other stuff instead later. It's a decent place to store media or the massive amount of junk that Xcode and Android Studio need to run.

 

[hot-gril]

I would agree, I really don't need a Mac any longer now that Apple has taken away about 65% of the usefulness of the Mac hardware and software over the years.

1. BootCamp gone with Windows support.
2. Upgrade Ram capability, for lower cost.
3. Upgrade internal storage for use of Apps and data for lower cost.
4. AAA games.
5. Upgrade a video card from Nvidia, taken away from Apple.
6. expansion slots.

And other things, I don't need a large screen iPhone.

Can I run Photoshop and Video editing on other platforms, yes and at a lower cost.

These all look like part of the gaming use case.

 

[Mchuv]

Each microSD card has its own controller and there are dozens of companies making their own controllers, each with different firmware.

This is probably why Apple hates add-on storage. They're used to coding for only Apple approved vendors.

I think you are wrong, the sd interface has a specific format and interface, i'm not familiar with the high speed ones, but with the slow it's easy to read/write data , you can use a a single 8 bits microcontroller like arduino to do it, the specification is very simple and the speed of the communications depends on the master device and the clock signal it generates (the Macs in our case). I think there is a big problem with the low level i/o instructions with Mac OS because i always have problems with external USB HDs like the current SD Bug, i have a 2019 15" MBP and it has also problems reading USB Thumbs, but this problems are not permanent, and with every MacOS update the problems are less frecuent, the most anoying is that you have to wait 30 seconds to unmount or mount am external device.

 

[CrysisDeu]

Apple, having all the data, decided to bring back the sd reader, so they seem to disagree.

When apple had to explain why they got rid of the sd reader the best reason they could come up with was that “an sd card protruding from the computer looks cumbersome”, as opposed to the elegance of yet another dongle, I guess.

It is true it was Apple’s decision to bring back sd card slot, but I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the claim that they did it based on data, due to the last gen macbook lacks the port itself, and removes the ability to gather such data.
If they remove it in a few years, that decision might be backed by data.
Maybe the decision for 2016 model was done that way.

 

[Manzanito]

It is true it was Apple’s decision to bring back sd card slot, but I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the claim that they did it based on data, due to the last gen macbook lacks the port itself, and removes the ability to gather such data.
If they remove it in a few years, that decision might be backed by data.
Maybe the decision for 2016 model was done that way.

Why bring it back otherwise? They had already paid the toll for removing them, and not many people were really expecting the card reader or the hdmi port to be back. The chips are awesome, so the computers would have been universally praised anyway.

 

[wilberforce]

Why bring it back otherwise? They had already paid the toll for removing them, and not many people were really expecting the card reader or the hdmi port to be back. The chips are awesome, so the computers would have been universally praised anyway.

Yeah, it's kind of a fail to remove the SD slot in 2016, endure all the complaints, bring it back in 2021 just as many "pros" are moving to CFexpress, then it does not work reliably.
Almost as if they suddenly decided to bring back the headphone jack!
Oh, wait...

 

[Fomalhaut]

I am sure if they put SD on the MBA and iMac and CF Express on the MBP that not a soul would be confused that the consumer model got a consumer card reader and the pro model got a pro card reader.

This is not a debate about the merits of SD cards versus other removable media formats. It's about what makes business sense to Apple, which wants to sell the maximum number of computers.

People need to get over this whole "pro" marketing label. Apple makes cheaper computers and more expensive ones. Anyone can choose either of these according to their needs and desires. Some people will be pro or keen amateur photographers, but most will not be.

Apple is selling to a mass market and had added options that it thinks (hopefully after some valid research) will appeal to the *maximum number of people* in order to make the computer attractive to buyers.

I don't think you can deny that *most* buyers of M1 Pro/Max are not people with cameras that use CFExpress cards. Some will be of course, but I would bet that a larger proportion of users will be reasonably affluent technical users who may have a few SD cards in cameras or other devices. Probably the majority of people who buy a new MBP will have no use for SD cards (or any other kind) at all - they just want a nice fast computer.

Plenty of people disagree with Apple's choice of ports, mainly because they don't personally have a use for them, or think it detracts from the inclusion of other ports that they would use. The choice is at least logical, and I assume Apple did some research into what *most* people say they would like and use.

Adding features used by a tiny minority would make no sense - it would please a very small number of people versus offering utility to a larger number of people - thereby making the MBP a more attractive purchase - which after all is Apple's business goal.

If you need something else (CFExpress, CFast, Red mini-mag, Alexa Codex.....), then you are in a small minority and will be expected to provide your own adapters. If you have an expensive camera that needs these formats, then you're rich enough to afford the dongle SD is the for the masses....

 

[Fomalhaut]

he said right in the same sentence your replying too.....

Not exactly. He said "I would love to have a Cfexpress slot since most high end cameras use that nowadays". He doesn't *explicitly* say that he uses CFExpress or has a high-end camera, although you could infer that...

More to the point, he said that "he hasn't use SD cards for 5 years". CFExpress 1.0 was launched in mid-2017 and CFExpress 2.0 in 2019, so he can't have been using CFExress for 5 years.

I was just curious about what he *has* been using instead! Maybe Compact Flash or XQD?

 

[Michael Scrip]

SD cards often work on one camera and not the other and one reader and not the other. SD cards being flaky and/or failing is expected.

Often? Like frequently?

I've been into photography/videography for over 15 years... and I've read thousands of articles and blog posts on the subject. And Youtube reviews.

But I've never heard widespread claims of SD cards not working across a variety of cameras or card readers.

Sure... they're not the most durable card. But considering almost every camera for about a decade used SD cards... and many continue to use them today... I'm having a hard time believing their "flakey" nature or that people are "expecting" them to fail.

I'm gonna need a little more info.

 

[Michael Scrip]

I'm confused - are dongles now our allies and ports the enemy?

Good question.

When Apple ditched dedicated ports and went all USB-C... people rioted. They wanted their ports back! Death to dongles!

Now we got ports... but they don't seem to be working to their full capacity... or maybe at all. Thus forcing people to use dongles anyway.

In theory having a port that can be anything, multi-function instead of a fixed function, it seemed like a good idea. But some people didn't want to carry dongles everywhere. Some dongles, like HDMI dongles, can be unreliable. And yet the built-in SD card reader in these new Macbook Pros doesn't seem to be reliable either.

It's a pickle.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[name99]

Apple can too. No problem with and SD cards and my iMacs and old MBPs.

That's not true. I think Apple changed something (for the worse) in SD card support with Monterey.
I have an SDXC card in my iMac Pro that worked flawlessly until Monterey. With Monterey it randomly "ejects" when the mac goes to sleep. (Not physically ejects, but unmounts, and not just an OS_level unmount, but enough that the file system no longer sees that it is present, along with a "disk was ejected incorrectly" warning,)

I'm guessing it's something to do with power savings (it aways is!), that Apple is trying for even lower energy states that in prior versions of macOS, and that some detail of how the card should be powered down to a minimal energy state is being missed. (Or, just as likely, was imperfectly specified in the spec, and different vendors each expect something subtly different.)

It may be more visible on M1 Macs because they have their own implementation of SD Card protocol, not whatever iMac Pro uses, but I'd say it's a generic problem with Monterey.

 

[MBAir2010]

How the hell can Apple break something as basic as an SD Card reader?

s demands the use of iCloud for photos ONLY
and use ONLY ON THEIR NEW DEVICES!

period

and
 wants you to stand in the corner for 5 minutes

 

[name99]

Yes, besides the wear, it's very slow for random writes. I used it with Time Machine for a while, and it still worked, but I needed the extra storage for other stuff instead later. It's a decent place to store media or the massive amount of junk that Xcode and Android Studio need to run.

SD cards have evolved a lot since they started! An SDXC UHS-I card will sustain 90MB/s writes indefinitely, which may not be "real" SSD speeds, but is good enough for a lot of use cases. And UHS-II is even faster.
You probably don't want to swap to them aggressively, but they're not bad little storage devices. I've used one top augment my internal storage for years.

But SD cards seems to aggressively attract scammers. If the card has an extremely low price compared to others in the same supposed performance range, it's probably a scam... You have to accept that you're not going to get 500GB of 90GB/s storage for $15, no matter how good a deal that seems! A good SD card will cost more (a lot more!) than the equivalent size of a 2.5" SSD, not least because it has to be so much smaller. If it costs thumb drive dollars, it will offer thumb drive performance.

 

[hot-gril]

SD cards have evolved a lot since they started! An SDXC UHS-I card will sustain 90MB/s writes indefinitely, which may not be "real" SSD speeds, but is good enough for a lot of use cases. And UHS-II is even faster.
You probably don't want to swap to them aggressively, but they're not bad little storage devices. I've used one top augment my internal storage for years.

But SD cards seems to aggressively attract scammers. If the card has an extremely low price compared to others in the same supposed performance range, it's probably a scam... You have to accept that you're not going to get 500GB of 90GB/s storage for $15, no matter how good a deal that seems! A good SD card will cost more (a lot more!) than the equivalent size of a 2.5" SSD, not least because it has to be so much smaller. If it costs thumb drive dollars, it will offer thumb drive performance.

That's 90MB/s sequential writes, not random. It's a lot lower for random. It also won't stay like that forever, since even SSDs have wear.

I do avoid any brands besides Kingston or SanDisk and only buy from reputable sellers. Buying off brand stuff from eBay is a great way to get a "256GiB" card that's really only a 4GiB one with firmware that lies about the capacity. They hope you take too long to fill it past 4GiB and discover it overwriting your data.

 

[jlc1978]

That's not true. I think Apple changed something (for the worse) in SD card support with Monterey.
I have an SDXC card in my iMac Pro that worked flawlessly until Monterey. With Monterey it randomly "ejects" when the mac goes to sleep. (Not physically ejects, but unmounts, and not just an OS_level unmount, but enough that the file system no longer sees that it is present, along with a "disk was ejected incorrectly" warning,)

I get that as well. Very frustrating as I us the building in SD as a backup disk. I remember when Macs just worked and things have gotten too complex that that is no longer true.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Often? Like frequently?

I've been into photography/videography for over 15 years... and I've read thousands of articles and blog posts on the subject. And Youtube reviews.

But I've never heard widespread claims of SD cards not working across a variety of cameras or card readers.

Sure... they're not the most durable card. But considering almost every camera for about a decade used SD cards... and many continue to use them today... I'm having a hard time believing their "flakey" nature or that people are "expecting" them to fail.

I'm gonna need a little more info.

I have 6 cameras with SD cards and have interchanged cards between them (and reformated in camera) and have never had a failure to function. If you don't re-format for each camera, sure, I would expect issues.

This is just my personal experience, but my qualification to date would have to be that I have *never* had a working card that didn't read/write in another camera. @ruka.snow 's *personal* experience may be that it happens *often*, which as you say requires definition. I suspect she is just giving anecdotal reports from sources unknown.

 

[Fomalhaut]

SD cards have evolved a lot since they started! An SDXC UHS-I card will sustain 90MB/s writes indefinitely, which may not be "real" SSD speeds, but is good enough for a lot of use cases. And UHS-II is even faster.
You probably don't want to swap to them aggressively, but they're not bad little storage devices. I've used one top augment my internal storage for years.

But SD cards seems to aggressively attract scammers. If the card has an extremely low price compared to others in the same supposed performance range, it's probably a scam... You have to accept that you're not going to get 500GB of 90GB/s storage for $15, no matter how good a deal that seems! A good SD card will cost more (a lot more!) than the equivalent size of a 2.5" SSD, not least because it has to be so much smaller. If it costs thumb drive dollars, it will offer thumb drive performance.

That is pretty optimistic I think. The labelled speeds are best possible *read* speeds with actual write speeds considerably lower.

This is while standards like "U10" (10MBps) "V30 | 60 | 90" (guaranteed 30/60/90MBps) exist.

(As an aside I have some SanDisk UHS-I SD cards labelled 150MB/s - which exceeds the UHS-I read-speed limit. Not sure what this means? Maybe there is some faster cache that can exceed the speeds for a while (like SSD read caches) )

 

[name99]

That is pretty optimistic I think. The labelled speeds are best possible *read* speeds with actual write speeds considerably lower.

This is while standards like "U10" (10MBps) "V30 | 60 | 90" (guaranteed 30/60/90MBps) exist.

(As an aside I have some SanDisk UHS-I SD cards labelled 150MB/s - which exceeds the UHS-I read-speed limit. Not sure what this means? Maybe there is some faster cache that can exceed the speeds for a while (like SSD read caches) )

I can tell you that if you buy a HIGH-END SDXC card (I bought SanDisk 512GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NP699ZI )
(There appears to be a much newer version of this card now, twice as fast, half the price!)

it still delivers essentially the performance claimed. I just tried bulk moving some large files and got reads at 90MB/s, writes at 80MB/s. When I bought it, it did match the claimed specs (95 rd, 90 wr), and the file system has been reformatted once, maybe twice, (started life as JHFS+, now APFS) so there's an accumulation of both normal SSD HW wear and tear, and some file system data structure fragmentation.

This card is 4 years old now and while I don't know how to quantify how much I've used it (I don't think there's any sort of SMART equivalent for SD cards) it's what I would consider "normal" usage for a mac. No swapping to it, no running VM's on it, but frequent reading and writing of files, some large some small.

But as I keep saying it's all in how much you pay...
I see you can buy a card that claims to have better specs than mine, from EDCRFV (there's a well-known brand!) for $30. I fully expect that will *not* give you the same, perfectly acceptable, long-term experience as my SanDisk card (which at the time cost me 8x as much, and still costs about 3x as much).

 

[name99]

That's 90MB/s sequential writes, not random. It's a lot lower for random. It also won't stay like that forever, since even SSDs have wear.

I do avoid any brands besides Kingston or SanDisk and only buy from reputable sellers. Buying off brand stuff from eBay is a great way to get a "256GiB" card that's really only a 4GiB one with firmware that lies about the capacity. They hope you take too long to fill it past 4GiB and discover it overwriting your data.

It's solid state! The dispositive variable should be reads vs writes, not so much random access!

I tried a quick test copying my Documents folder to the SDXC card. That's about 4.5GB with about 15,000 items -- the easiest " full of small files" folder I could find.
That copied over at essentially 80MB/s with a small glitch in the middle. Substantially better than I actually expected -- the combination of APFS and solid state storage is pretty damned impressive!
The drive of interest below is mjh (the one with the little SDXC icon next to it) and the two red areas show
(first one) a bulk write of some large files and
(second one) the write of the 4.5GB with 15,000 items.

Of course to get great performance you want to use at least JHFS+ and ideally APFS.
So many people seem to be using their external storage (whether SD card or SSD or hard drive) as whatever they bought it as, which is usually some version of DOS FAT, and is, of course, TERRIBLE in performance -- but that's all on the file system, not the actual hardware.

 

[wilberforce]

It's solid state! The dispositive variable should be reads vs writes, not so much random access!

I tried a quick test copying my Documents folder to the SDXC card. That's about 4.5GB with about 15,000 items -- the easiest " full of small files" folder I could find.
That copied over at essentially 80MB/s with a small glitch in the middle. Substantially better than I actually expected -- the combination of APFS and solid state storage is pretty damned impressive!
The drive of interest below is mjh (the one with the little SDXC icon next to it) and the two red areas show
(first one) a bulk write of some large files and
(second one) the write of the 4.5GB with 15,000 items.

Of course to get great performance you want to use at least JHFS+ and ideally APFS.
So many people seem to be using their external storage (whether SD card or SSD or hard drive) as whatever they bought it as, which is usually some version of DOS FAT, and is, of course, TERRIBLE in performance -- but that's all on the file system, not the actual hardware.

btw, I am not finding as much of a problem with writes as with reads.

Here is a 32GB UHS-I Sandisk Extreme Pro "95MB/s" card (ExFAT format) in the 14"MBP internal SD slot:

This is the same Sandisk card in a dongle: (and I get a similar result in my 2020 iMac's internal SD slot):

And here is a 64GB UHS-II Sony G "300MB/s" card (ExFAT format) in the 14" MBP internal SD slot - no problem!! :

This is the same Sony card in a dongle (actually slightly slower):

 

[name99]

btw, I am not finding as much of a problem with writes as with reads.

Here is a 32GB UHS-I Sandisk Extreme Pro "95MB/s" card (ExFAT format) in the 14"MBP internal SD slot:
View attachment 1925171

This is the same Sandisk card in a dongle: (and I get a similar result in my 2020 iMac's internal SD slot):
View attachment 1925173

And here is a 64GB UHS-II Sony G "300MB/s" card (ExFAT format) in the 14" MBP internal SD slot - no problem!! :

View attachment 1925178

This is the same Sony card in a dongle (actually slightly slower):
View attachment 1925182

ExFAT is a terrible file format from the dawn of time! You can't use it as a reliable benchmark of HW performance!
At the very least (for interest's sake) I'd reformat the bad card as APFS and see how it performs when it has a clean, modern FS on it, not who knows how many years of exFAT fragmentation.
(Why the difference in the two macBooks? I have no idea. Maybe the older macBook only supports one request at a time, whereas the newer macBook SD HW supports a queue of multiple requests which it can use to hide latency as it bounces around the card address space?)

Ultimately what you are saying is that (for undetermined reasons) one particular SD card is working badly in one particular MBP card slot. We can argue/investigate why that should be (multiple hypotheses have already been put forward, including by me, as to changes in the Apple SD support SW in Monterey).
But none of that is relevant to the larger point, that decent SD cards perform decently as auxiliary storage for a mac. Not as fast as an SSD, no, and probably not with as long a lifespan. But simpler and taking less space than an SSD, and fast enough/good enough for many use cases.

 

[wilberforce]

ExFAT is a terrible file format from the dawn of time! You can't use it as a reliable benchmark of HW performance!
At the very least (for interest's sake) I'd reformat the bad card as APFS and see how it performs when it has a clean, modern FS on it, not who knows how many years of exFAT fragmentation.
(Why the difference in the two macBooks? I have no idea. Maybe the older macBook only supports one request at a time, whereas the newer macBook SD HW supports a queue of multiple requests which it can use to hide latency as it bounces around the card address space?)

Ultimately what you are saying is that (for undetermined reasons) one particular SD card is working badly in one particular MBP card slot. We can argue/investigate why that should be (multiple hypotheses have already been put forward, including by me, as to changes in the Apple SD support SW in Monterey).
But none of that is relevant to the larger point, that decent SD cards perform decently as auxiliary storage for a mac. Not as fast as an SSD, no, and probably not with as long a lifespan. But simpler and taking less space than an SSD, and fast enough/good enough for many use cases.

Well, the main (original) point of this thread is that the new MBP card slot/software is faulty, not whether the SD cards can be used as auxiliary storage. (Which I agree they can, with some reservations about reliability as I have had 7 card failures in about 50TB of recordings, mainly MicroSD).
HFS+ or APFS is not a viable format for cameras, as I am not aware of any camera that can use those formats. And a large number of people wanting to use the SD slot is related to camera usage. Also the default format for SD cards is ExFAT, sometimes FAT32.
Anyway, as you suggest, here is my result with the Sandisk card reformatted to APFS, in the 14" MBP card slot:

This is not an isolated card. I have about 5 out of 10 cards with similar issues. All work perfectly in a dongle, a hub, 3 readers, and in all the other devices and Macs that I have.

Not arguing with you, btw, just adding to the thread, for information. Replying to your comment was just for convenience, as you made some good points

 

[dspdoc]

So back on topic: What's the consensus here? Do people really believe Apple released these new machines with faulty hardware that will require a recall, or land in a class action lawsuit? Or, is this just another Monterey bug that an update will fix and growing pains? I am having a very hard time imagining that Apple does not thoroughly test these things.