Most counterfeit cards are stamped with a premium brand name, because the idea of counterfeiting is to make something of little value appear of greater value.Agreed, need to figure out the cause. I can catch the problem now with relatively few devices deployed, but I'm starting to send more of these out and need it to be safe and scalable. I don't think they're counterfeit, they're always SanDisk or Samsung. I buy them from Amazon or https://bulkmemorycards.com/It's possible for an SD card to go bad to the point it melts. Here is an example posted by what I consider a reliable source:
See the photo I posted in reply to another comment. The enclosure isn't touching the card. I'm not going to drop my enclosure and risk breaking it, but I just tried to drop a microSD card from 2 meters and it did nothing. I've tried to break an SD card with my fingers. Maybe I'm weak but I couldn't do it. If someone else can do it, let me know!
viewtopic.php?p=1022002#p1022002
It seems important to track down what is happening because of the potential for more than the card cracking and just getting hot.
Since you are using relatively high capacity SD cards, is it possible the cards themselves might be substandard or counterfeit? If the cards are counterfeit, then airmail delivery could correlate with the breakage but not be the actual root cause.
Of course, buying a noname card with advertised large capacity at significantly lower prices is a recipe for disaster.
Anything cheaper than typical market prices is likely to be counterfeit. Unfortunately, not everything sold at the regular price is genuine. Such cards have entered the supply chain and sold by Amazon. The kittens suspect shipped by Amazon may mix stock of identically branded SD cards from comparing sensors. I've not heard so much about counterfeit SD cards recently, but that may be due to Pi users switching to Pi 5s with SSDs instead.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Tue Nov 11, 2025 3:53 am