Thinkpads Forum

I bought one of these SanDisk MicroMate USB SD card readers:
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(20 ... _SDHC.aspx
with a regular 2GB SanDisk SD card included.

I have noticed that it corrupts some files when copying to it from the T60. This manifests in two ways:

1. Single large files:
   These files appear to copy okay, but when you read them off the card, they are obviously faulty (e.g. zip a file, copy it to the card, extract the zip file from the card, it fails). This only appears to affect files that are > ~20MB in size.
2. Many files:
   These files also appear to copy okay, but when you read them off the card, Windows XP will barf on some of them saying that "the file is missing or corrupt". The file cannot be read individually from the disk, and even attempting to delete the file results in the same error (I need to format the card to clear it off again).

Now, I have tried this card reader in my desktop PC and it works fine. Interestingly, files written to the card by the desktop PC can be read by the T60 fine. So it appears that the T60 is just having issues writing to it. I have also tested this card with another T60 (March 07 build) and it has the exact same problems.

The only answer I can come up with is that the T60 is not giving the MicroMate enough power when writing to it. I wonder if anyone else has the same problem, though? With this particular card reader, or any other USB key?

I have the exact same problem with my 40GB USB drive with few exceptions*, I always thought the drive had some issues but that did not seem to be the case now.

*exceptions are it can only copy music files perfectly other stuff like softwares and compressed data with winrar, winzip gets corrupted.

So far, I have not tried to find any solution to this. If you do find please post.

Thanks -- good to know that I'm not the only one, and a word of warning to others: the T60 may not supply enough power for some USB devices (and no, there was no warning that the limit had been reached).

astro wrote:I bought one of these SanDisk MicroMate USB SD card readers:
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(20 ... _SDHC.aspx
with a regular 2GB SanDisk SD card included.

I have noticed that it corrupts some files when copying to it from the T60.

The only answer I can come up with is that the T60 is not giving the MicroMate enough power when writing to it. I wonder if anyone else has the same problem, though? With this particular card reader, or any other USB key?

Being a relatively new product, the MicroMate has a few issues that are currently being addressed by the mfg. I have first hand experience with the issue you describe above.

That said, one item that _can_ be ruled out is lack of power from the ThinkPads' USB port. I use an extremely wide array of devices powered via USB on my T60 and have yet to have single issue. From ext hard drives running at 7200 rpm to the smallest and least resource intensive device. During some of my performance testing I have noticed that if I plug in a device prematurely while the boot process is running, I do get the message that "there may be insufficient power to operate this device". One of my fellow EE's is lending me some test equipment so that I may further diagnose this issue and I will report back.