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Let's Reinvent the SD Card

About a month ago some a random LinkedFluencer posted some bullshit about how her SD card failed. She was raging that she should have been notified by her computer that it was reaching end of life and that if it just exposed wear leveling through to the system she would have gotten a proper notice.

She mentioned SMART reporting. She did not specify what specific card she was referring to.

My guess? Cheap, shitty, and off-brand.

She said something like "The reason for this is that the SD card spec doesn't have specs for reporting wear level information."

All the various dumbasses upvoted this crap and were praising her for such brilliant thinking and such a great idea.

I got wind of it because a fairly famous technologist I'm connected to praised it too and I got a notice.

I did what I always do when I see bullshit on LinkedIn. I reposted it and said, essentially, "This is fucking stupid." I, of course, censored myself to meet the idiotic LinkedIn standards. You can say "fucking" there but it messes with the algorithm and some butt-hurt babies will report the post despite cursing being allowed on LinkedIn. So I criticized it as much as I could.

And... of course everyone told me I'm an idiot and don't understand the problem.

The technologist said that if he put his weight behind it he could make it happen. I mocked him of course as that is just not going to happen and even if he did get the standard extended it wouldn't matter at all.

There are a few problems:

• The SD card spec does not require anyone to change.
  Those making crappy SD cards will just keep doing so. They will continue meeting just the bare minimums and there is no consequence. The SD Association only says, basically, "here are some marks that you must meet these specs if you use them". The existing marks would be unchanged if the spec was advanced. You'd need some stupid new mark like "SD-WL" for SD Wear Leveling, and almost nobody would use it.
• SD card reader/writer chipsets wouldn't support it.
  The majority of existing SD card reader/writer chipsets are horrible. Most of them don't even support calling vendor extensions at all. The hardware just has no support for it. Some hardware does support more, but it's irrelevant when 90%+ does not.
• Even if it was done, cheap SD cards would fake it and still break
  Remmeber how I mentioned she didn't mention what card and it was likely a crap one? That situation would remain unchanged. She'd probably still buy the cheapest card she can find with the "SD-WL" mark and it would end up being fake. Then it would fail. Then she would go on LinkedIn and cry about how there are no consequences to those faking the marks.
• SD cards, in my view, should just be killed off.
  I own over 40 SD cards. Vastly varying in quality. Most of them have garbage speeds. These things should not be improved. They should be abandonded. Move on to a better standard like the new microSD Express. SD cards were originally designed to be easy to implement with low end hardware if you need. That's still useful but we should not settle for that and should just advance the systems and cards to use NVMe ultimately. SD? Just let it die.

The problem is not the spec. In reality there is no problem at all. If you want cards and systems that support wear leveling, just fucking buy the ones that exist right now. Otherwise shut the fuck up.

I will address one minor point these idiots were claiming. Their claim? "All SD cards do wear leveling, it's just not exposed, and only because there is no standard." They may do wear leveling, but the extent to which it is done well varies drastically. The only actual reasonable measure of a card is testing various scenarios. It would actually be nice if all vendors were required to run standard tests and show the results, but that isn't a world we live in.

If these idiots had their way? They would publish a pointless API call that IS going to be gamed and still doesn't actually ensure any card is good quality. You get what you pay for, and sometimes paying more just gets you more ripped off.