I have a SD card: SAMSUNG Evo Plus microSDXC 512GB
I also have a laptop: Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming 7577 with Windows 11 Pro
I also have a phone: Asus Zenfone 8 Flip
And, of course, I have a problem: transfer FROM SD Card TO PC is on average 0.8 MB/s. It fluctuates between 0 kb/s to about 3.83 MB/s, never going above 4 MB/s. And this fluctuation tells me something is wrong big time, because it's happening when copying large files (200 MB to 1GB), medium files or small files all the same.
I tested the card with another laptop, and taking into account this laptop is really old, the 25 MB/s sustained transfer shows that it's not the SD card that causes the issue.
Most of the solutions and or/explanations I researched do not apply in my case, do not work or are unacceptable.
I don't, for example, want to format the card in NTFS. This is a memory card to be used in the Android phone and it will stay that way. All I want to is to occasionally do a backup of the data saved on that SD (pictures, videos, documents etc).
Now, I am aware that this laptop is not Windows 11 compatible, but did an upgrade anyway, for my company's internal compatibility reasons. Need to deal with it somehow.
This SD card is rated at 130 MB/s read and 120 MB/s write. Max, of course. Also, this laptop never had any issues with SD Card reader it is equipped with. Never seen 120 MB/s transfer, but I was comfy with average 55-60 MB/s. Only after upgrade it plunged.
I updated drivers several times for this Realtek SD Card Reader - via Windows Update, via Dell SupportAssist, via manual update of latest version of the driver available on Dell website. Nothing worked. I shall mention that every update was successful and definitely every one was Windows 11 compatible - I checked.
The problem I have is somewhat different from other questions asked and answered: I know what I'm doing and what my problem is, and I know that the card I'm using is actually supporting that. That or the card I'm using is capable of writing 8k/30fps (and I have some videos shot in that) but not capable of reading 720p/30fps, which I find impossible.
I just gave up and am using USB-C stick to copy from the phone to it and then to PC. It works better than SD in PC Card Reader (it says it will finish copying 110 GB of data - mostly large files >200MB - in 15 min compared to PC where it was supposed to take 18 hours).
My question is: can I do something about it or do I just accept the fact that Windows 11 is the problem and stick to above workaround as a permanent method?
EDIT:
There is definitely something fishy.
After putting back the SD into Asus phone I started copy to USB-C stick (as mentioned). It slowed down as well, showing 5% done after 68 minutes. I aborted the copy and tried to copy from SD to internal Asus storage. Same problem.
So went back to old laptop and tried again After 5 minutes transfer plunged to 1.3 MB/s as well and stayed there for next hour and 7-8 attempts.
I attempted to find out if something was throttling transfers, so I uninstalled AV (Bitdefender Total Security - it has no "Pause", you can either stop every security feature separately, so I nuked it instead), but no joy. There SD Card Reader doesn't work in Safe mode - or at least doesn't detect SD Card in that Mode - so no joy checking if something else causes problem.
So I started hardware checks - took another, not yet used, identical SD card, unpacked it and tried if it worked. And it does.
However, things turn weider: old PC is Dell Inspiron 7746, on which I did all testing in this Edit. It has Windows 10 and HDD only. The other SD card tested with average write of 81 MB/s and read of 78 MB/s, constantly. Several times to see if there may be some caching issues in Windows etc. No problems.
Same card (that is: the new one) also works much better in 7577 than the old one, but read/write speed stays at 30 MB/s. This laptop is 3 years younger, and is much better spec, including NVMe SSD, so why it's slower bugs me immensely, as well.
So now question needs to be amended to: do you think the bad SD is fake or faulty? I wasn't abusing it for last 6 months, was basically storing pics and audiobooks on it, and was listening to these audiobooks, so what is going on?
EDIT 2
I've inserted the old card back to Asus phone, and copied all contents onto indernal memory. All 110 GB took probably 13 hours (at 10 hrs it was at 75% and I went to bed, in the morning it was finished, that's why probably - estimating on elapsed time), after which i swapped the cards, plopped in the phone new card and copied on it all the data from internal memory. Operation took about 2 hours. Good.
Old card... old card went into another phone - Samsung Galaxy A52 - and I formatted it. Or at least tried. Phone stopped formatting at 20%, after 2-3 min it froze and then rebooted. This cycle was repeated again after reboot, but on third format attempt it went through, card was finally recognized and I switched to it as a default storage. I also tested this card and copied all the data from the phone (pics, vids, docs) onto SD. 11 GB took about 3 mins to copy. I then started testin it by recording 4K 30 fps videos. Afrer 1 hour of total record time and playing all of them back several times I can't find any issue...
WTF? Only thing that comes to mind is fragmentation - which can cause slow transfer to the tune of 1/50 of the max transfer, but there is no way for that to happen - it was literally written once with audiobooks, then it was only saving pics and vids. I deleted maybe 4 screenshots (made accidenally). Is something happening in the background? if these unknown operations are writes, why and when? Kind of important, because it means any use profile impacts lifetime expectancy.
