Hot SD cards

[Burngate]

I wish Raspberry Pi had built-in flash. It can't easily work without an SD card and most people (especially new people who aren't going to try to boot off something else) have to buy one, so why not just put some trustworthy flash in? Or make Raspberry Pi branded SD cards that we can trust.

Different philosphy.

One of the beauties of the Pi is that, by merely swapping the Sd card, you can have a pristine machine - all your past mistakes have gone.
If there were on-board storage, you could never be sure that yesterday's errors won't come back to haunt you.

[Graymalk]

Different philosphy.

One of the beauties of the Pi is that, by merely swapping the Sd card, you can have a pristine machine - all your past mistakes have gone.
If there were on-board storage, you could never be sure that yesterday's errors won't come back to haunt you.

That would be great in a perfect world where we didn't have to worry about people trying to rip us off. I have considered keeping multiple SD cards around for single Pi's so that I could just swap them in and out and get different functionality. But SD card quality is such that I'm more concerned with that than I am with this interesting other convenience these days.

[Burngate]

YMMV, and in this case your mileage is very different from mine - though all that means is the two data-points are different, and says nothing about the wider world.

[amell]

Im pretty not happy. Noticed my Pi wasn't responding to ssh, so went to investigate.

SD card was smoking hot and too hot to touch. No lights on the pi. Turned it off and pulled the SD card.

As you can see in attached file it has burn marks on it and a crack along it. This is a genuine Sandisk Ultra 16GB

How has this happened? This is a Rpi3 - do we have a design issue here? The SD card should not get this much current. Its a safety issue as far as I am concerned.

[blaablaaguy]

Im pretty not happy. Noticed my Pi wasn't responding to ssh, so went to investigate.

SD card was smoking hot and too hot to touch. No lights on the pi. Turned it off and pulled the SD card.

As you can see in attached file it has burn marks on it and a crack along it. This is a genuine Sandisk Ultra 16GB

How has this happened? This is a Rpi3 - do we have a design issue here? The SD card should not get this much current. Its a safety issue as far as I am concerned.

Woah. Are you sure that was genuine?

[amell]

Woah. Are you sure that was genuine?

Yes. It was purchased from a well known UK Pi accessories reseller. Preinstalled NOOBs image with the Pi3. I won't name them to avoid embarrassment but have emailed them.

[Duhjoker]

Yea fortunately we were able to catch the problem before any thing caugt fire but only because we were paying attention.

What if someone were using a headless pi from 5 miles way.

And how do you spot fake or modified cards?

Thieves are unscrupulous and talented in forging fakes and even packaging.

[Dis93]

And how do you spot fake or modified cards?

http://www.heise.de/download/h2testw.html
The program has a button to switch to English.

[liz]

I've changed the title of this thread, given that this is a problem with damaged cards and not Pi-specific. It was a bit alarmist.

[Heater]

This topic has come up a few times recently here. Coincidentally I had an SD card smoke itself recently as well. It had been working in a Pi B+ for months prior to that, running an app that did no writing to it.

A google search will reveal that hot and smoking SD cards has been an issue in mobile phones and tablets for some years.

It's a bit of a worry given that I bet there many Pi are in use with no case.

Perhaps there should be some safety warnings around the place. Like don't use you Pi uncased resting on a stack of paper notes on your desk, as I am prone to do.

Of course this is not Pi specific. It applies to almost electronic gadgets.

[Duhjoker]

It may not be pi specific but it is a legitimate problem that people should be concerned about period.

This is still a dangerous situation.

Period.

People should know about the dangers of using fake or modified cards with any product. And for you to remove the danger warning you are saying i dont care.

But when you get sued for not providing the right safety info about the dangers, it will be a whole different story.

[liz]

Thank you for the warning, Duh. Please do not revert moderators' edits; your original title was inflammatory (no pun intended). I've reverted your reversion.

Thread closed. Please don't start another one.