Continuous recording to sd card stops once card is full

Cameras
1

Hello,

I tried to see if this issue was already addressed in the forums but didn’t find anything.

I have two v1 cameras and my v2 just arrived today. In both v1 cameras I have a 32gb sd card with the cameras set to Continuous recording. They both have been recording fine but stop recording once the sd card is full. My assumption is that once the card is full, the older clips will be deleted to make room for the newer content. I have been unable to find anything that supports my assumption. The first time this happened, I eventually pulled the sd cards and reformatted them thinking that maybe there was an issue with the cards.

My questions are 1) am I understanding this feature correctly and 2) if so, are there things I should do to get my cameras operating as expected.

Thanks

2

I have not seen this issue reported either. Have you tried reformatting the card from within the app to see if that makes any difference?

3

Latest updates on this issue. I attempted to format the card from within the Wyze app. The camera made a ding ding sound and the app reported the card had been formatted. However, the available storage space still indicated that the card was full. I repeated this a couple times with the same results each time. I then removed the sd card and inserted it into my laptop. Windows reported that it could not read the device until it was formatted. So, I formatted it as fat32 from windows. This time the drive was cleared of all previous content. I re-inserted the sd card into the camera and repeated the steps to format the card from within the Wyze app. The camera is again recording video to the sd card and I’ll report back once the card is full to see if it is again properly deleting the old content to make room for the new.

At this point, my best guess is that either I have a faulty micro SD card or that it wasn’t properly formatted.

4

I’d tend to think one of your guesses is correct. Hopefully the issue is resolved now.

5

@burns.97. Ive had success by first formatting in exFAT (All my cards are above 64GB), Then pop it in the camera . Reformat via the Wyzecam app… Once my cards have filled, I noticed older clips were deleted.What are your current results?

6

I have 3 V1 cameras and just noticed this same issue on one of the cameras that is full. It is no longer recording and I cannot view recorded clips. All I get is “No video at the selected time”. Not sure if this is related to the type of cards as I had an 8GB card in the same camera initially that worked ok and recently replaced it with a new 32GB that I did not format. So maybe it has to do with formatting too. I’ll reformat the cards today and see after another 7 days if it works correctly after getting full.

@iMacco7, I thought the maximum card you can use is 32GB, apparently I was wrong but is this based on the version of the camera or both V1 and V2 can use over 64GB cards?

Thanks!

UPDATE! some users on Reddit are mentioning that having the card in FAT32 gives the less than 100MB message and prevents recording and that formatting in exFAT solves the problem.

7

Well, one camera is working but the original one I noticed the issue with is still stopping once all space is consumed on the SD card. I’ll try formatting as exFAT this time as well as have the camera do its own format and see if that works. If not, seems like maybe I have a bum micro SD card.

8

Can you run the h2testw program to test that SD card? It is possible that it is reporting more capacity than it really has. Once it fills the true capacity it can start overwriting what was written earlier, including the file allocation table (where the name FAT comes from) and then the system can’t find anything when you try to use it again.

See this https://www.wyzecam.com/forums/topic/sd-card-write-protected/#post-127064

9

@burns.97 SD being corrupted was also reported by eric16 in:

https://www.wyzecam.com/forums/topic/v2-firmware-4-9-1-42-released-to-beta/#post-130859

10

Sorry for the delayed update, I was traveling for work and didn’t have time to mess with the cameras. Last night I reformatted the sd card using exFAT. I was going to also check the card with h2testw but I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to find a site I trusted to download it. First few sites didn’t instantly make me comfortable.

Unfortunately, I also noticed this morning that my second v1 camera had stopped recording a couple days ago and reports no space available on the sd card. I was able to format the card from the app and it did free up all the space. I’ll see if the issue returns and report back.

11

I downloaded from the most original source I could find: https://www.heise.de/download/product/h2testw-50539/download

It is prudent to be wary of where you download from. I first found out about this program from

https://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold-standard-in-detecting-usb-counterfeit-drives/

and they reference the German distribution.

Acknowledgements
To Herald Bögeholz who wrote the Program H2testw, Thank You!
To c’t Magazin für Computertechnik, Thank You!
To www.heise.de for hosting the download of the programme, Thank You!

https://www.heise.de/download/product/h2testw-50539/download

I just downloaded (clicked the green Download button) and then did a virustotal scan. You should be able to reproduce the test.

0 / 60
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SHA-256
0d54b8beca3bc2ebfab543dbe793d52658d278538f9062b816fb77abe2dac187
File name
h2testw_1.4.zip
File size
213.02 KB
Last analysis
2018-04-19 18:59:56 UTC
Community score
+204
DetectionDetailsRelationsCommunity3Basic Properties
MD5
e56fbcbc6f0a2c7ae125869951c63992
SHA-1
6123af83acc20f962ce23179e1e2111ac0df036d
File Type
ZIP
Magic
Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
SSDeep
3072:RwCXlmJWhIjZR5P9IrnKzKuE7fEeozOyfEjhAVy6tqPzxqFHIJ45O+LBh0dEQ:R+UhIpUnKzKuE78RQMYxKIJrCBhNQ
TRiD
ZIP compressed archive (100%)
File Size
213.02 KB
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History
First Submission
2009-02-14 04:42:16
Last Submission
2018-04-19 18:59:56
Last Analysis
2018-04-19 18:59:56
Earliest Member Modification
2008-02-11 11:33:36
Latest Member Modification
2008-02-11 13:45:06

This program may not be the fastest, but it is thorough; I have never seen it fail to detect a bad card. Some claim it detects a few “good” cards as bad, but I am wondering if those claims were from sellers of counterfeit cards.

NOTE: this does write to almost the full capacity of the flash, so it does use up one of the devices write lifetime.

You don’t need to install it, just unzip the file. No need to run from administrator account, it just creates files and reads them. But it doesn’t just write a simple pattern, if you are interested see below.

When the program starts, click on the “English” button unless you prefer German. Then select the drive to test. Then click write+verify and go do somthing else for a while.

Basics of operation: start with a freshly formatted (quick is fine) card. h2testw will choose a seed for a PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generator). It then creates 1GB files using the stream of output from the PRNG until the device has less than 1GB, then creates the last file to fill the device. Note: each of these files are different and “apparently” random. Then it resets the PRNG seed to what it used before, so it can recreate the same “pseudo random” stream a second time. But this time it reads the files and compares them to what was written before. If there are differences it reports how many difference there were. On a good card the report will look something like this. The header is mine for documenting what I was testing. Note it can’t test the part that was part of the file system, that is why it gives the warning about not testing the whole capacity.

All testing done with Win10 on MicroCenter B638 USB3 port to Plugable USB 3 Hub to Rocket USB3 dual card reader/writer

Samsung EVO+ 32GB class 10 UH1 microSD

–h2testw results follow–

Warning: Only 30515 of 30516 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 23.6 MByte/s
Reading speed: 76.0 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

12

Thanks @BuckEye! I’ll try and give this a try this weekend.

13

Tested the card in the second v1 camera. Looks like the card has issues. I try the other one and see its condition.

 

Warning: Only 29653 of 29654 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
27.3 GByte OK (57276280 sectors)
1.6 GByte DATA LOST (3453064 sectors)
Details:1.4 GByte overwritten (3030838 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
206.1 MByte corrupted (422226 sectors)
1.3 GByte aliased memory (2891864 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000000c86200
Expected: 0x0000000000c86200
Found: 0x0000000410aef200
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 2.16 MByte/s
Reading speed: 1.97 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

14

Do you mind sharing the claimed brand of the card? Also where you bought it? If it is relatively new, I would try to get my money back. Since these cards appear to work, most victims don’t realize they have been sold a bad card until it is too late (and they can’t get money back, and worse they have lost valuable data.) That’s why it is always a good idea to test any flash device (SD or USB) with h2testw before using it for important data.

The ebay sellers of counterfeit SD and USB devices usually have great feedback, because buyers just put the card/USB stick in their PC, verify that the capacity is what was claimed by the seller, and verify they can save a file and read it back. And all that looks normal until you exceed the true capacity, and it starts writing to Aliased memory (the same physical memory has more than one address, i.e. reading from X and X+offset will access the same memory cell).

Your flash is very different than the fingerprint of most “capacity doctored” cards. Normally they report a multiple of the true capacity (and normally it is a power of 2, (e.g. 2, 4, 8, 16) times the true capacity. If what you have claimed to be 32GB, It should have had at least 32,000,000 bytes available to you, and since Windows reports capacity in GiB (1 GB=2^30 or 1073741824 decimal), so 32,000,000 decimal bytes will be displayed as 29.8GB in Windows; that’s normal. The last 32GB microSD I bought at MicroCenter had less than 30,000,000, and was slow. It was also not significantly cheaper than a Samsung SD on sale, so I stopped buying MicroCenter branded generic microSD cards. But MicroCenter’s cards I purchased always passed h2testw.

I now only buy Samsung or Sandisk and from Amazon (direct, not third party), B&H Photo or MicroCenter (when on sale).

15

My second sd card failed to even finish the test.

Both of these cards are from MicroCenter. I had a coupon for a free one and picked up the second one at the same time for something real cheap. I guess this is another situation where “you get what you paid for”. Both cards are MicroCenter branded Class 10 HC 32 GB cards. I have a SanDisk in my v2 Camera and just used a second SanDisk to replace the now dead card from MicroCenter. I’ll expect the other one (results of the scan posted above) to also fully crap out on me at some point.

Thanks for all of the advice.

16

Edit: I just checked the MicroCenter reviews and recent ones are mostly positive 5 start reviews. So maybe you just got some from a bad batch.

The MicroCenter cards used to be a good deal, and they had a lifetime warranty. But they don’t anymore, and they try to upsell a “replacement” warranty. The quality (speed) and capacity have both dropped in the last two years, and the prices went up (unless you get the “special” deals). If you look at the MicroCenter microSD reviews and sort by date, you will see many more recent complaints. (see edit above, it does not appear this was a correct assertion).

I still like MicroCenter, but no longer buy either MicroCenter branded SD or USB sticks from them.

A free flash drive that overwrites data is not a bargain.

Please leave a review on MicroCenter including the output of your h2testw results. Customers need to be warned not to trust the cards with valuable data, at least until they have run h2testw.

17

How many days of recording are you guys getting on a 32GB card?

18

It depends. SD or HD. Continuous or Event only. If event only, how frequent is the movement.

In my garage I have 32 GB for nearly 2 months and it’s less than half full, but there are very infrequent events.

19

It looks like I was incorrect about the MicroCenter reviews. Recent ones are mostly 5 star. Perhaps you got ones from a bad batch?

But the speed that the one that your posted results from show a card that is poor quality (probably getting high read errors and has to use error correction to get correct results). It is not performing anywhere close to class 10 specs. Perhaps the MicroCenter buyer found a bargain that was too good to be true.

From a business standpoint, if MicroCenter was aware the cards were reporting higher capacity than they really had, it would have been better to throw them away and write them off, than to give them away (especially with the MicroCenter logo on them). People will remember losing irreplaceable pictures long after they forget they got the card free as a door prize.

I would take the card back to MicroCenter and ask for a replacement. Then test the replacement with h2testw before using it.

If you continue to use the card, as soon as you write more than the card has memory, you will start overwriting previously written data. Windows has no idea this is happening. If it writes over the first sector MBR (which contains the partition entries), the next time you insert the device, windows will tell you the device needs to be formatted. Since your card started writing over at offset 13132288 (decimal), 0x0000000000c86200, it must have explicitly been programmed to make the overwriting be less obvious by not double mapping low memory.

20

Having this issue with known trusted SD cards (Samsung cards from Amazon, EVO select which is only available via Amazon).

Been recording on 64GB SD cards and they all recently stopped recording due to filling up with something like 0.04GB free. I only noticed this because my wife said one camera was making clicking noises and constantly flashing blue/yellow.

If I format once, they show 0.00G/0.00G. Formatting again shows the expected 0G/59.59G and start recording again.

Hoping the issue doesn’t return, but pretty sure I formatted the devices when I got them, so I think it will.

Running latest version of V2 4.9.1.60.