Hi, I’m on the X1C for a couple of years with not many problems. Recently, the printer has not detected my SD card anymore. It’s an SD-card that has been firmly placed in the printer since I installed it, and I’ve never taken it out. I tried reformatting it from the printer GUI and then it was found. But today, it is once again not found.
Super annoying obviously since I can not send files to the printer that way anymore, only do a direct print. Not sure how to troubleshoot?
Regards
The SD card that was supplied with my P1S failed within a week. I replaced it with a known working SD card and have not had any further issues.
The label on the P1S SD slot does say the SD card is not hot-swappable. If you touched it when it was powered up you could have killed it. Not all SD cards are born equal.
I was unable to recover the failed SD card. It’s in the bin now…
SD cards do have a limited life span which is shortened with a high amount of writes to it. Suggest replacing it with a high quality card.
I see. My card is not some cheapie that came with the machine either, it’s more high end I gather. And compared to the ones in many of my gopro’s, that have been there for 5+ years - this one hardly get any writes at all.
Whenever I format, i starts working again for a while.
Try a different card.
If it is recognized consistently, you know that the present card is defective.
If the problem persists, the card reader may be defective.
Changing the card is the easiest and least expensive test.
Did you take an air duster and blast out dust from the card slot?
The price you paid for the card or the brand label has little relevance to the endurance of the card. The NAND memory technology used in SD Cards has a limited write capability. These can range from the low end of 10,000 write cycles to over 100,000 depending on the manufacturer. Different manufacturers offer different varieties of SD memory.
Also, when a memory location is “worn out” the internal circuitry is supposed to map that to a bad block table in order to tell the OS that this block is no longer available. There have been enough posts here regarding this problem with Bambu that would suggest that he file system driver they are using for some reason doesn’t deal with this sort of issue even though it’s supposed to be transparent to the OS.
Ideally, you want to use a high endurance card which one typically finds used in video surveillance cameras which are constantly overwriting memory as they loop through their recordings.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=high+endurance+SD+card
Thanks for card info. I just assumed this printer can’t have more than 50 write cycles or so, since I rarely record time lapses or send files to the card. I just tried blowing air into the slot. Will see if that help, if not, try another card to confirm where the error lies.
That is an important detail.
One thing that is noteworthy is that the SD cards sometimes behave erratically depending on where they were formatted and how. One thing you could do is format it in Windows and uncheck the box that is on be default that says “Quick Format”. This will do a sector by sector read/write of each part of the SD Card. I doubt this is the cause but it will eliminate one more thing.
I didn’t know you could use a card over 32gb… I had some nice, new 256gb cards, and they wouldnt read in my X1C.
Maybe I’ll check that again when I get home.
They need to be formatted to FAT32.
You can’t use a card over 32GB. The max supported is 32GB. One could format a larger card but the rest of the space would be wasted.
Thought that was prob the case.
The card the OP pictured was 128.
I don’t see the need for anything above 32 if all you do is send files to it.
If you’re sneaker networking maybe, but even then it would be easier to just keep them mostly on the pc, put only files you print often.
Without folder support even 32 becomes a bear to manage.
Just as a note here: That 128gb (agree massively oversized) card in the picture has been running fine for the past 2 years. I have not changed anything, I have not removed it. One day, it stopped working, so I just assumed it was a software update that messed something up.
If I recall correctly, NAND memory devices always write to NEW blocks before reusing old areas. That’s how they get their speed. If the firmware is limited to 32Gb and the card is a bazillion Gb, only the first 32Gb will be used before overwriting tries to occur. I’m not sure what will happen when the 32Gb is reached and there’s still free space on the device (card). I suspect some fault occurs and the only way out is a reformat. The cards are pretty smart at keeping track of used blocks and their limits. A quick reformat resets the counts but I don’t think it resets all the block flags. Perhaps a full reformat does that.
I’ve had a 64Gb card in my X1C for over a year without doing anything to it. I wonder if the 32Gb is a true limit.
That’s partially accurate. I used to sell NAND memory as part of my product portfolio, and there were a couple of whitepapers by Sandisk describing the algorithm. The process of remapping bad blocks is called wear leveling. SD cards have very crude wear leveling, if they have it at all. This is what the manufacturers of high endurance cards told me when I was in the business of building ruggedized systems for industrial automation and military use. They stated that the high endurance cards used multilayer NAND technology combined with better wear leveling controllers that remapped bad blocks. We relied on them heavily for systems that had to survive everything from Eielson AFB in Alaska to the Saudi desert to the deck of an aircraft carrier. Standard commercial cards just wouldn’t hold up, especially when we were doing data logging.
You are spot-on though that full reformat - sometimes erroneously called low level formatting - will perform extended read/write cycles during the format and remap the bad block whereas a quick format simply rewrites the file allocation table and does no testing for bad blocks.
One time-tested utility I use for benchmarking my SD memory is CrystalDiskMark download | SourceForge.net. Try to ignore the silly anime version—the developers are from Asia and, for some unknown reason, chose to skin some versions with immature anime. It’s a pity because I can no longer recommend it to clients, as it would diminish my standing if I suggested something with a cartoon skin. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool for benchmarking the performance of an SD card. If you test two identical cards side by side and one is nearing the end of its life, the performance difference is often stark.
Today I can see the files when viewed from my printer display, but the app reports “No Files” in the Device Tab / MicroSD Card
Tried a different card now, 64GB one that I found. Formatted it with exFAT but can still not be seen by bambu studio.
aha I see. I only had the Choice of NTFS and exFAT using windows 11, right click on SD card and choose “format”.
