SD Cards

The choice of SD card is important to get the most out of your BlueSCSI, especially if you are trying to achieve sync 20-40MB/sec performance.

💡 Tip:

A bad SD card often does not look like an SD card problem. If your BlueSCSI is producing no log.txt, an empty log.txt, refusing to enumerate as USB serial, dropping off the SCSI bus, or throwing CRC errors, swap in a card from the Recommended cards list below before troubleshooting further. Users routinely cycle through several cards from the same brand without success; trying a different brand is more useful than trying another card from the same line. See also the Troubleshooting page.

First

Always format a new card with the SD Card Formatter tool - full overwrite format.
Always backup important data, no medium lasts forever!

Recommended cards

📝 Note:

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but recommendations for known good (or bad) cards. Any SD card will work.

High Endurance

High Endurance cards are recommended due to the constant read/writes of the disk images. They usually only cost a few dollars more.

Western Digital Purple
Samsung PRO High Endurance

Regular

These have been tested without issue.

Samsung EVO Select
Microcenter SD
Amazon Basics
Walmart ONN. SD
Newer SanDisk with the latest BlueSCSI FW.

Cards to Avoid

Kingston

Kingston SD cards do not fully comply with SD communication standards. Logic analyzer testing has confirmed non-standard behavior on the SD bus, requiring special workaround code in the BlueSCSI firmware. While they may appear to work intermittently, Kingston cards are not recommended. Users have reported intermittent read failures (e.g., “General failure reading drive C”) that resolved immediately after switching to a different brand.

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