Testing a CF Card thoroughly

[VanillaCoffee]

So I have a 16GB CF Card suspected of being faulty because I've always had issues with it.

The problems began with I formatted and partitioned the CF Card in G-Parted to where I kept getting errors and the tasks would never complete, all other CF Cards I have work just fine so I know it has nothing to do with the card reader.

I was also unable to format the drive in Windows nor in Linux so I was stuck with a card I couldn't use. I then decided to test it out in my retro WIN98 PC and see if I could wipe it that way and install MS-DOS to it via an IDE to CF adapter just for testing purposes which worked however I could only use 2GB in FAT16 because for some reason I couldn't get the WIN98 CD to format it using fdisk to FAT32 but I could not rule the CF Card being at fault at the time as it could have been a number of issues why it didn't work but I was able to format it in DOS "FAT16" just fine using MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disks.

My next test was using Ventoy... Ventoy has been a good tool for me where I've had success wiping corrupted storage devices that wouldn't otherwise format using other methods. I fired up Ventoy and installed it to the CF Card and everything went well so I ran another test on a Windows machine using the CMD command window and the CF Card came back as tested OK although the test was very fast so I'm not sure if it was an effective test or whether the test checked the entire CF Card. I then formatted the CF Card in Windows and everything went fine. I then assumed the CF Card must be fine until I got an error today when transferring some files to the CF Card.

The CF card is formatted in exFAT this time. It seems that if I copy files and use up more than 3GB on the CF Card its fine but going past that and I get errors while copying to the CF Card but if I click on re-try they continue to copy fine but I end up with some files not copied properly so there has to be something up with the CF Card.

I need to carry out a thorough test on this CF Card before deciding what to do with it but I have no idea what software will do that.

Any recommendations?

 

[camtaf]

From what I have read, this indicates some sectors are failing, sometimes they can be read, other times not.

There doesn't seem to be any software that can work, because the built in memory management system swaps the blocks around.

 

[VanillaCoffee]

Luckily I still had the receipt for it and I got it exchanged for a voucher.

 

[The Duck]

I bought a couple of 64 gigabyte usb flash drives recently and used them once and both of them failed.
Like you I had my receipt and was able to return them for a full refund.
Any more I'm thinking it's worth buying the service plan for a couple of extra dollars.
I have a bowl filled will sd cards from digital cameras and some of them still work some don't.
I have had good luck formatting memory cards with dd copy.
They just fail after awhile without any warning.

 

[VanillaCoffee]

I bought a couple of 64 gigabyte usb flash drives recently and used them once and both of them failed.
Like you I had my receipt and was able to return them for a full refund.
Any more I'm thinking it's worth buying the service plan for a couple of extra dollars.
I have a bowl filled will sd cards from digital cameras and some of them still work some don't.
I have had good luck formatting memory cards with dd copy.
They just fail after awhile without any warning.

I've had plenty of SD cards fail on me in the past mainly the ones I used on the Raspberry Pi's but the SD card in my camera has lasted years. I've never had any USB flash drives fail on me sometimes they can become corrupted/unreadable but its normally an easy fix and they continue to work again. In my experience USB flash drives are pretty solid. CF Cards can have a high failure rate if they are used in the wrong way but are much more reliable than SD Cards. SD Cards are normally ok if they are left in your phone or in a digital camera but if they are used for other things they can die without warning I find.