Hello all,

 

I've been recently burned by a failing SD card (armbianmonitor -v possibly saved me a much worse fate!) and I'm now trying to proactively avoid a similar situation.

 

I found that WD has a line of cards that claim a health status feature that  "Helps in preventive maintenance by signaling when the card needs to be replaced". One of them is the Purple QD101 that seems reasonably priced at $15 for 64GB.

 

I'm not finding much in the way of details of how this is exposed though. Is there any way to get access to this information on linux?

most likely smart interface, you can query/manage it with smartctl provided by package smartmontools.

Thanks for the reply. As soon as I get my hands on one of these SD cards i'll post my findings here on whether I get any useful information out of it with smartctl.

Look into mmc-utils. This is the tool you want to use to interact with SD/MMC/eMMC devices. SD cards do not use SMART, you might have to dig a bit further to find out how to check their health status.

 

I found a doc from Micron that might be helpful: https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/technical-note/sd-cards/tnsd02_enable_sd_health_monitor_system.pdf?rev=1fee627f3c974c139b3533bdd47a635f

 

Additionally, you must use a native mmc interface to interact with your card, such as MicroSD card slots that are directly attached to the SoC, a PCIe based card reader in your laptop, or a Realtek USB card reader that uses the "rtsx_usb" driver. The normal SCSI based card readers will not work.