I have a Samsung 128GB SD card in my Outdoor Cam, which I formatted using the camera itself. The app reports that the card is present in the camera, and it’s writable without problems: I have it set to timelapse, and the amount of space used is increasing steadily as the days go by.
However, when I try to read the card on my laptop (a MacBook Pro running OS X 13.4), the OS reports that the card is unreadable. It can read other cards without problems, and has read this card without difficulty in the past. I’ve tried two different card readers, with the same results.
Interestingly, if I put it into a PC, the PC reports that the card needs to be repaired, but after doing a “Scan and Fix” (and reporting no errors) it is able to mount the card successfully and all the expected files are there. If I then put it back into the Mac, the Mac refuses to look at it again.
So it seems that the camera is doing something weird with the card. Using the PC offers me a possible workaround, but it’s hard to have confidence in this as a solution.
Has anyone had a similar experience with their camera, and is there a fix?
It sounds like the sd card is formatted in a way that only the pc can read, and not the Mac. I don’t have a Mac, but haven’t heard of this issue.
You may want to try formatting the card with the Mac, and then inserting it into the cam and NOT formatting it with the cams app button. See if this allows you to view the footage on both Mac and pc, as well as writing to the card with your cam.
Wyze Support got back to me to say that the Outdoor Cam v1 only supports 32GB cards. Wyze’s help document about formatting cards for use with their cams says that cards up to 32GB should be formatted with FAT32, and cards larger than that with ExFAT – but doesn’t mention that only the newest cams (perhaps only the Cam v3) can support the larger cards.
So I suspect that what might have happened is that the camera formatted the card using FAT32 (which is all it knows how to do, because it was never designed to work with larger cards). When I then put it into the Mac, the computer recognized the card as a 128GB card and ‘knew’ that it ought to be formatted with ExFAT, but found instead that it was formatted with FAT32, said “Something’s wrong here” and bailed.
Whereas the PC said “Hmm, there’s something weird about this, but I can work with it.”
It’s possible that formatting with ExFAT on the Mac would work – that is in fact what I did originally, and the Cam could certainly see the card – but I’d worry about what might happen once the Cam tries to write more than 32GB of data to the card.
So I think what I need to do is fall back to a 32GB card and not tempt fate by trying to use a larger card in a device that really isn’t compatible with it.