[draphts]

This is my first post, but I've been lurking for quite a while and done numerous searches on this topic - pardon if I missed anything, and thanks to all involved for such a strong and helpful community!

I've had no trouble getting Leopard (and now SL) installed on my Mini 9, and I love this little machine. HD space being an issue, I use the hell out of the 16GB SD card that shipped with mine from eBay.

However, once every...let's say 2-3 months, the SD card's filesystem (HFS+) suddenly becomes unreadable and I start getting the, "The disk you inserted cannot be..." messages. Disk Utility is no help in recovery (cannot be repaired), likewise Disk Warrior (error 32), and while I lack other SD-capable machines to try it on, I see no reason to think that they would be able to read/recover any data; as the card works perfectly in my Mini up until these sudden corruptions, I assume that the situation would be similar on other Macs. If I reformat I'm back in business without issue - minus my data, of course.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? I realize that it could technically be a fault in the card itself but that seems unlikely, and even if I were to try a new card it would be months before I could confirm or deny that premise.

Failing that, any suggestions (aside from keeping a good backup)? I'm thinking of trying a different file system, but only because I can't think of anything else to fiddle with. Considering that some people actually run OS X from the SD, that seems especially like a shot in the dark.

Minutiae:
16 GB Class 6 SD Card
GUID Table
HFS+ FS
Disk Utility reports Invalid Nodes, cannot repair.
Disk Warrior begins rebuild but detects multiple (50+) overlapping files and errors out with -32.

Dell Mini 9
32GB Runcore
2GB RAM
OS X 10.6.2

[ehunt123]

Wow, it took long enough for this to be addressed. I've had this three times now over mine months, with nothing indicating a bad FS or anything wrong. Each time, the machine would just get slow as if it were out of memory and chewing up the swap, and a reboot would show the bootsector was cooked.

I spent a few hours one day trying to research this, since you can get SMART from SSD but developers have pointed out that each manuf implements this differently and SSD tend to be more fickle (no tick of death or noise).

The problem existed across multiple operating systems and I found most of the links pointing to Dells, but I think this was because of their preference to use STEC drives. It seems that in the 8GB and models earlier, this is a common problem after a few months of normal usage. Each person, on mainly Linux and Windows since many 8GB mini9 OSX users go with the 16gb upgrades, all had a similar story

That's as close as I got before really reaching the end of the Internet. If I had to summarize, it seems like the earlier STEC models have some issues with this—not sure why because I can go and reinstall Linux or OSX right over it. Later ones showed no indication of having the same problem, but I could say that is because larger drives are newer. From a few users going out and replacing with one of the two companies who make the proper size for the mini9 (forgetting the name but they're on newegg), they seemed to not run into this problem.

Anyone else?

[spida505]

I have a 16Gb SDHC that corrupted magnificently after I installed SL - it had been FAT32 format and started reporting the wrong file sizes plus seemed to have a recursive structure with ghost files - like infinity mirrors. Took forever to delete the affected data. Reformatted MacOS Journaled GUID partition and it told me approx. 1/3 used - only 10Gb available BUT on insertion back into Dell, showed 15.something available. Replaced all my data (backed up, fortunately) and a) it fits and b) it works... I have no idea what happened there. However, disk utility now reports it's perfectly OK, even though it also reports half the space is used for only 2Gb data - 5 or 6Gb bad blocks?... I really don't trust it so all data is backed up regularly. May try full erase and reformat when I get the time.
**********************
22/01/10
Doh... "journaled".... it's doing what it's supposed to do. But that wasn't the case with the FAT32 format.

[erillanos]

Recently I have had this issue to not sure when it started.So far I have not lost
anything important