I think many people have had issues with SD card recording at some point. But unless you check the SD card periodically to ensure it’s recording as expected there is no way to know if it’s not working. And it’s very frustrating when you go to look for footage, and find it’s not there.
The SD card could go bad. It could get corrupted. There are times when it’s full and it does not erase the older footage (this was a bug in the firmware at one point.)
So I’d like to see some form of notification / message / indication when a camera cannot write to the SD card as expected. It should be able to check what it wrote to the card is actually there, periodically, and create some form on alert/notification if it’s not working as expected.
And if someone puts in a larger (64GB or larger) SD card it will recognize it as having a few MB or space if it’s the wrong format. So having a notification of low space would be good when a card is inserted.
this is a pretty good idea but just a small thought on one section of your post, if you have a notification of low space, that would be a constant notification because the card would be constantly filled assuming the writing over of older files is working. As soon as a card is filled it begins the loop of writing over old files so in effect the card is constantly full. I don’t know a way to work around that one. I’m not a programmer so I’m not qualified to comment on the rest, but in theory this would be a great thing to have.
I made a post recently so if these SD card issues happens to be the cards being use, maybe we will see a pattern and avoid those cards and thus those issues.
Thanks. Yes, I’ve seen the posts on SD card issues. I’ve had a couple myself. I’m sure it will get better as the Wyze team get’s to the bottom of the issues. On the low disk space - I was thinking about when a card is inserted, so a one time check the. But yes, having a notification that that older files are now being over written (just once when it starts to do that) would be good too! But the most important, to me, is when it expects to write to the card but can’t for some reason! Not knowing when that happens is a big problem!
Using the right type of card is critical of course. Endurance rating is the only way to go (ref Samsung PRO Endurance). It would be simple to implement an error counter to summarize write errors per hour into a health flag. Color codes could provide the health, green, yellow, red, etc. Wyze would need to test with bad cards to validate the feature. I think that most of the issues people have with cards in Wyze devices is that they are not understanding how to buy a card.
I like this idea and I was wondering about this myself. SD cards do occasionally become unexpectedly corrupt and people usually do not find out until they need to access data from the card…not good.
Please add memory card error notifications from within Wyze app, echo notification or Alexa voice prompt.
I would like to know if I should replace my memory card before its too late because memory cards don’t last forever and having a warning would help users get the footage they need just incase a break-in or crime happens
I definitely want an alert/notification when the SD recording failed.
More then a few people have run into the issue where they thought it was recording but it was not because the SD card had stooped working for whatever reasons.
I recently created a new wishlist item cuz i didn’t see this item when I searched for “microSD”. The “issue detection” piece of code is absolutely needed (yesterday). I’d be willing to design, write, and, test the software myself… it would be one of my #contributionstosociety
Please allow a page in app to monitor SD remaining storage and allow push notifications for percentage used selections for each camera. This is especially important when you have to actually view events and find out that it didn’t record because SD card was full. Also why do you have to Reformat Cards everytime they are full and it won’t go back to view actual last thing recorded. Could be days old and preview player doesn’t update that info. We have the very large capacity MSD cards in cameras and have had issues for months since the last firmware update that happened around the holidays end of '22.
You shouldn’t have to reformat the card every time it fills up. It should automatically loop and start recording over the oldest footage. Yours isn’t doing that huh
Can I ask what firmware you’re on on what camera and also what type of SD card you’re using?
It is a Wyze Cam v3 & the firmware version is:
4.36.11.4293
There is what I believe to be based on app showing total space available is a 60G Micro SD card(It is a name brand card too!). It says after I had to Reformat card there is 0 of 58.22G used
Once you format your clearing that card so it should show that there’s nothing being used. That is correct. But if it’s not looping the recording itself that could be indicative of an error on the card and you might have to pull the card and do a full format using a PC. What brand of card is it?
SD cards fail, they all have a finite life, some longer than others, but they will eventually fail. I am proposing an SD card health check. Right now, if an SD card fails, stops being able to be written to or read from there is zero notification of an issue at all. The camera just keeps writing or thinking it is writing and when you go to look at the footage or local events there is nothing.
What I am proposing is a software update that does as a write/read check on the card. Where it writes a bit, could be a time stamp text file, and then reads what it wrote. If successful the card is good, if it fails the internal check multiple consecutive times, then provide a push notification of the issue. I suggest doing this at or between each video write so that over time the whole of the card is checked since sectors of the card can fail.
Any notification for a SD failure would help a lot. Have a few cameras that dislike their cards no matter if I swap them out and just a reminder to eject and push the card back in would be fantastic
ok, the sd card nerd is here, I Apologize for being so late to the party here.
so… What you are proposing an what you would like to be done are on the face very easy and simple but when you get into the actual details of what would need to be done and what you’re looking for turn out to be quite complex. I’m speaking not as a Maven that works in conjunction and support of with the company but as someone who is an actual nerd and speaks from knowledge of what is done with memory.
I would argue that considering the limited capabilities of the computer processing unit of our cameras it would be quite hard for them to do what I would love for them to do which is notify the user of an issue. You have a few different processes that could be checked, each have their own pluses and negatives, you have something like file system checks which depending on which programming language they use will check for file system errors, I’m speaking on ignorance here but deciding that none of the sd cards should have any programing file systems on them this should not be something that is used. I could be wrong but again speaking on ignorance I don’t think it would be utilized. Upon thinking on this more the most programming files that the camera can get from an SD card is when you flash a new firmware from the SD card although it only takes that information, it doesn’t consistently start from that information. So again that would be mute.
#2 option. Data integrity checks or crcs can help check out the SD card and make sure that the values that are known to be good are equal to anything that are known to be missing. So you’re basically checking for any corrupted files. Easier than the aforementioned checks but at the same time I don’t know for sure being the not nerd I want to be if that is possible on our cameras considering their capabilities.
When you get really deep you can Do what is used for hard drives which is a smart data check which is an acronym which in case smart stands for -self monitoring analysis and reporting technology, this one actually uses a lot of things that I am not sure of and I don’t know the exact technology behind it but in doing a quick search it’s one of the ones that came up. I’m gonna go on a limb and say that our cameras aren’t that capable. Is something that is used on hard drives both general ansd that have terabytes of information which if my memory serves correctly is at least a few gigabytes smaller than what our cameras are capable of really handling effectively.
Alas we come to my favorite the read-write test, now this one will actually check for bad sectors or other issues on the actual SD card itself. This will write test data to the card and see if it can read it back successfully. Knowing the limited memory available to our cameras I don’t know if they’re capable of it or not but if they are I would love to see them implemented and if they aren’t I would love to pay a little bit extra to have it implemented if it’s feasible but as I’m not a shot caller I can’t say that I can make a call and get this implemented. Although I have been fortunate enough to meet many amazing people within the company including the founders ( I have to brag when I can) and thank them for what they’ve done I still don’t have that kind of pull, much to my dismay.
So as the resonant SD card nerd I posted these just to share a breadth of knowledge that I have or have found and as the person that is going to claim responsibility for the high endurance card expansion for our cameras (I think at least 4 people will agree with me on that one) this is the type of thing that I don’t know if our cameras are capable of although I would highly agree and love to see implemented if they are.
I can assure you that if I have another meeting with anybody from Wyze This is the type of thing that I will definitely bring up to them and hopefully they are in a position that they can have knowledge of or implement themselves. I hope in some small way this serves to give some sort of knowledge to yourself or anyone else that might read this, I know I speak for the company as anyone that has any effect, but I do hope that certain employees that browse these forums read this as well and get curious and say hey can we do this? There are a few things that have happened just by that same circumstance and if this were to take that same path I can’t say I would complain. If you have any other questions and you want me to look into I would be more than happy to, just tag me in and I will do what I can.
Just tossing this out there. . The cam already knows the used/free space of the SD card (Manage SD Card). Even after it starts overwriting the old data there would/should be some change in ‘free space’, even its only a few bytes.
When the cam couldn’t chage the free space any longer, that might indicate bad card. Not elaborite, down side = false positive?
Very valid point, although I don’t know the refresh rate on our cameras. I say that only because I have actually formatted my cards For them to show that they still have the exact same occupation that they had before I hit format, but if I immediately go back and hit restart on the app and restart the camera it seems to refresh and the camera doesn’t read from the cache on the SD card and it shows that it is a zero memory rate. So I don’t know exactly how or how often it refreshes from the SD card or how that might be fixed.
