Recovering Data From SDXC Memory Cards
Discover the essential guide to recovering data from 64GB and 128GB SDXC and SDHC memory cards in this comprehensive tutorial. Whether you’ve experienced data loss or need to retrieve files from your SDXC card, we’ve got you covered. We provide expert solutions and step-by-step instructions to help you recover your data effortlessly. Learn critical steps and ensure the safety of your valuable files stored on SDXC memory cards.
Fortunately, the market offers numerous data recovery tools that can help you get your data back. But there is something about these cards you should know before you reach for a data recovery tool.
- Flash Chips: Riddled with Defects
- Recovering Data from SD Cards
- Recovering SD, SDHC and SDXC Memory Cards: Is There a Difference?
- But I’ve Just Bought a 64 GB SDHC Card!
- Questions and answers
- Comments
Flash Chips: Riddled with Defects
Can you believe you can buy the whole 64 gigabytes of fast, high-quality solid-state memory for as little as $20, or does it sound too good to be true? Why is an SSD drive of said capacity three to four times as expensive as a much smaller SD card with similar capacity? Isn’t it using exactly the same type of memory, just in a different shell?
In fact, you can’t really buy 64 gigs of high-quality flash memory for under $20, and there is a good reason why SSD drives are that much more expensive compared to SD or micro SD cards. The answer is buried in the question itself. Why you can buy a 64 GB micro SDXC memory card off Amazon for not much more than $20, the actual flash memory the manufacturer puts in these cards is of a completely different quality compared to that of a typical SSD drive.
So how exactly are manufacturers able to achieve these unbelievably low memory prices? They do smart tricks to make the memory card appear as 64 GB of contiguous space while in fact the actual chip is riddled with defects.
Each memory card employs a tiny microcontroller that maps flash cells to logical addresses. The memory chips are manufactured with abundant capacity. During the manufacture, the chip is tested for defects. Unreadable blocks are simply mapped out and become non-addressable and inaccessible from the outside. Bingo! We’ve just turned an imperfect chip into a perfectly usable memory card. These tricks are nothing shoddy; they are used by all SD card manufacturers, and they are part of the published SD standard. If not for these tricks, SD memory would probably cost the same (or more) as today’s SSD drives.
Now when you know the truth about today’s flash chips… can you trust them your data? In fact, you can. Granted, SD cards can sustain a much more limited number of write cycles compared to an SSD drive. When one or more data blocks reach their end of life, the built-in microcontroller of said SD card is supposed to take them out of circulation and assign their logical address to another (working) cell. But what if that cell contained some system information such as a part of a file system? If this is the case, the memory card becomes corrupted, and you’ll need to use special tools to extract information from that card.
Recovering Data from SD Cards
Luckily, we have a large number of data recovery tools available on the market that claim to recover the entire content of your memory card. But were they really tested with any of those memory cards in their compatibility lists, or do developers simply assume the recovery will work based on the same principle as traditional magnetic media? In fact, I’ve seen both and in between. Some products can recover all types of SD cards as they claimed, some other tools can’t deal with SD cards at all, while some other tools can only recover SD cards up to 32 GB.
Wait a minute… Why the 32 GB limitation? Why some of the tools can recover 32 GB cards, but fail miserably when reading a 64 GB one? Should the tool either work or not? The reality is more complex than the numbers. While SD memory cards up to and including 32 GB conform to the SDHC standard, larger SD cards (64 and 128 GB) conform to a different standard called SDXC.
Recovering SD, SDHC and SDXC Memory Cards: Is There a Difference?
There is in fact a big difference between smaller (up to and including 32 GB) and larger (64 GB and up) SD cards. The former conform to the SDHC standard, while the latter use the newer SDXC standard.
For you as a user this can mean two things.
- First, if you are using a 64 GB memory card, make sure that both your portable device and your computer’s SD card reader advertise support for SDXC cards (or simply put, they explicitly state support for 64 GB SD cards). If your card reader is old and can only support SDHC cards, you won’t be getting anything but errors if you try to read that card with your computer.
- Second, SDXC cards are formatted with a different file system. Let me explain. When SD cards initially appeared, they used FAT32 as a file system. FAT32 was good enough in the old days. However, this file system has inherent limitations, restricting maximum file size to 4 GB. Just a few years ago this would be a laughable limitation. Today, a typical HD video will already run you more than said 4 GB. If you try to save a large file onto a 32 GB memory card (formatted with FAT32), the write operation will fail.
This is why the SD consortium decided to use a different file system for the new generation of SD cards. 64 Gb, 128 GB and larger SD cards come formatted with exFAT.
exFAT is a new file system developed by Microsoft. exFAT is based loosely on the original FAT32. However, exFAT does not have the limitations of the older FAT/FAT32. exFAT is extensively used in portable electronic devices due to its lightweight design. This was one of the reasons exFAT was selected by the SD consortium as a standard file system for the SDXC format.
Are there downsides to exFAT? There’s one, but it’s a major one. While exFAT is designed and owned by Microsoft, it’s not free. Microsoft requires manufacturers pay licensing fees for using exFAT in their devices. As a result, this has become a limiting factor for many portable electronic devices, especially inexpensive ones. This is one of the reasons why you can use 64 GB SD cards in some devices but not in others.
As a result, when recovering data from a 64 GB SD card, you’ll need two things:
- An SD card reader supporting SDXC (or stating explicitly that it can read 64 GB SD cards);
- A data recovery tool that supports exFAT;
Not all data recovery tools can support exFAT because of the restrictive licensing model employed by Microsoft. Even if a tool advertises support for “all types of memory cards”, it may or may not support exFAT. One of the tools known to support SDXC memory cards and exFAT file systems is Hetman Partition Recovery.
But I’ve Just Bought a 64 GB SDHC Card!
Sigh. This chapter is probably the most disturbing part of this article. Every other week, we receive an email from a customer describing a typical situation. Because are so many reports, and because they all describe the same thing, let me just summarize it below.
A guy buys a 64 GB SD card for a price that’s significantly below the market. When the memory card arrives, he tests it in his computer, discovering 64 gigabytes of usable capacity. Suspecting that 64 GB of flash memory for under $5 could be a scam, the guy tests the card by writing some data. The writes are extremely slow (3-7 MB/s), so testing the entire capacity would literally take the whole day. He writes some 1-4 GB of data and reads it back. All seems fine, so the guy formats the card and puts it into a phone, MP3 player, digital camera, or whatever portable device he bought it for.
Day after day, week after week the card is filling up with data. Pictures, music and videos are saved onto that memory card. 8 gigs, 16 gigs, 32 gigs, 64 gigs – the writes keep going, the memory card seems to be holding well. Then all of a sudden a photo won’t show in a viewer, an MP3 file won’t play, a video won’t show up. The guy takes the card out and connects it to a PC in an attempt to save the rest of the data. But… oops! There are no photos, music or videos on that card, just garbage.
It is this moment the guy seeks for help and writes us an email. Sadly, in situations such as the one I described our hands are tied: that memory card was a fake. In fact, the “deal” advertises a 64 GB micro SD card for only $4.79. Yes, it’s under five bucks for a 64 GB memory card. The description is Pidgin English and reads something like this: “New 64 GB Class 10 Micro SD HC Memory Card with Adapter Fast USA Shipping Dependable memory card for your favorite photos, videos, apps, and games Easily transfer files between phone, tablet and camera” blah, blah, blah.
Remember: if it seems too good to be true, it’s probably not true. See that “Micro SD HC” designation? It’s a dead giveaway. You can’t buy 64 gigs of memory for $5. And, THERE ARE NO 64 GB SDHC CARDS, period. The SD standard dictates that all SD cards with capacities higher than 32 GB are made to conform to the newer SDXC standard. If you buy this card, you won’t be getting anything but a fake.
Ditto. Do not buy these. Remember how the packaging looks, and ignore deals that seem too good to be true.
hi hetman, As you have stated (First, if you are using a 64 GB memory card, make sure that both your portable device and your computer’s SD card reader advertise support for SDXC cards (or simply put, they explicitly state support for 64 GB SD cards). If your card reader is old and can only support SDHC cards, you won’t be getting anything but errors if you try to read that card with your computer). I made this mistake thinking my old card reader will read SDXC 64 GB. Then I tried another reader which also gave me error and said Disk need to be initialized. I removed the card. My question: is my card corrupted by using old card reader? Does card initialize message means the card will need to be initialized and then recover the files using Hetman Software? Is there any way to repair the card and fix it, instead of using recovery software?
If you need to recover your memory cad data, you can try to do it without initializing. To repair memory card, you need to initialize it. You can do it in Disk Management menu.
Thank you for the reply... fortunately, I used a hi speed data transfer card reader and it was able to read the card ... my problem was solved...
Is it possible to recover photos from a 64 gb sdxc card that was formatted by mistake?
Of course. Try Hetman Partition Recovery: https://hetmanrecovery.com/hard-drive-data-recovery-software
I was really really educated by this post and I found it very very useful. Many thanks Michael Miroshnichenko. Thumbs up!!
You are welcome. Always happy to help.
How can I format my 64gb exFAT SD card? Every time I run a chkdsk /f on cmd it give me a message that "Corruption was fould while examining the volume bitmap. An error occorred while recovering lost files."
Hi. Make sure that your SD car is not swtiched to "lock" or "write protect".
It's not lock at all. How can I format this?
Then try method that described in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqtMqLKaS4
Here's the problem that I have, although what you are saying matches my experiences to a "T" there's another side of the coin. Because of my experiences I have found a way to improve your chances of receiving a good card. I also bought 4 128GB microSD cards High Capacity from a Chinese manufacturer. I always have the same process when receiving these cards. 1) Scan (with a very good virus scanner) for malware [I suggest Malware Bytes or even Avast!] 2) Format card to exFat with the defaults in all other areas and renaming the card to one I can use & remember for each device [i.e. - ARG SAMTAB 128GB]. 3) Test the device with 2 photos, 2 videos, 4 mp3's or other audio formats and several different docs from different programs placed on the card. I then try to read the information on the card through my device and then on a PC/Laptop. From my experience, when dealing with Chinese manufacturers of these cards they tend to have viruses/other malware/ & be fake. I tend to reveal a ratio of 79/21 failure rate. In laymen's terms: When I go through this process before even using the card, 79% of the time I find a perfectly good high capacity microSD card. Now, I understand that I shouldn't have to do this, but here's what you may not understand. One of the many ways that these manufacturer's save on Labor (in order to make these types of products cheap) is with NO quality control methods. So, yes I buy cheap. BUT for 79% of the time I find good cards when becoming my own quality control it becomes worth it for me. Also, I always buy from a dealer who has a refund process where I do not have to ship the product back with my funds. [i.e. - Wish, Geek, etc. etc.] This way I can ask for a refund or an exchange of the product. Of course, with the new product I have to do it all over again, but in my experience I have rarely had to do this more than twice. TIP: If you buy from Wish or any of it's other sites, buy your products individually. So , if you want 2 MicorSD cards make 2 purchases. WHY? because when you ask for a refund you must return the entire order to be replaced. If one is good and the other bad you don't have to send both products back.
I wish I’d read this earlier, but unfortunately I’ve already had a sad experience with a cheap card I bought for my camera on a Chinese website. I took lots of photos during my vacation in Egypt but when I got back and tried to transfer the pictures to my laptop, everything was gone – the card looked empty. I racked my brains trying to figure out how to restore the data but nothing really worked. So yeah, I think it would have been wiser to spend some extra bucks on a more reliable card than suffer the consequences.
Is it possible to recover all types of data from an SDXC memory card, including photos, videos, and documents?
Yes, it is possible to recover all types of data from an SDXC memory card, including photos, videos, and documents. However, the success rate of recovery depends on the type of damage or corruption to the memory card. If the memory card is physically damaged, then it may not be possible to recover any data from it.
How can data loss on an SDXC memory card be prevented?
What are the factors that affect the success of SDXC memory card recovery?
How long does the SDXC memory card recovery process take?
The amount of time it takes to recover data from an SDXC memory card depends on the size of the card and the amount of data that needs to be recovered. In general, the recovery process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours.
What are the common methods for SDXC memory card recovery?
Read about recovering 64GB and 128GB memory cards. If you do have any questions, don't hesitate to contact our technical support service - we will be happy to help you.