[TG] [TG11] Axiom 12 SD drive corruption

[weschwab]

I have installed a new Axiom 12 and am using Navionics Platinum plus charts.

The SD chip/drive gets corrupted so the Axiom or a computer can no longer access (find) the drive. This is the second time this has happened. I can't even reformat the drive. The Axiom or the computer behave like the chip is not inserted. The first time Navionics replaced the chip.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening and how to prevent it?

I'm also not pleased that the Axiom does not physically eject the chip (pop it out) and I can only remove it with needle nose pliers.

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello weschwab,

If your PC no longer lists the SD as a device when you connect it then that's not software/corruption, that's hardware (failed MicroSD card.) SD cards are produced in very large volumes at very low margins and the failure rate is higher than is ideal. Here in technical support, where we use a lot of SD cards, we probably throw away a couple of failed SD cards a month. Writing large volumes of data to the card frequently - e.g. frequent chart updates - would stress the card and make early failure more likely. I think you should get the card back to Navionics again.

Re. removing the card from the display: I do this on my bench test Axiom display regularly throughout the day with my thumbnail. I agree that an eject would be more convenient, but I suspect that the reason why one wasn't used in the design was the number of people who still used pliers and destroyed their card readers in the previous a/c/e/eS-series displays which did use a spring-eject. We try to reach the best compromise in this sort of situation and believe that a little more effort to remove is worth it if it prevents people completely destroying their chart slots.

Regards,
Tom

[weschwab]

Thanks for the info, I didn't know the SD cards can be "used up" by data transfers. I wish there was a way to backup the Navionics nav chip.

I have made extraction easier by installing the remote card reader and by putting a small piece of tape on the SD card to act as a handle to extract the SD card from the rear SD card slot.

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Yes, unfortunately but understandably, the copy-protection of the chart data prevents it being backed-up to another card. It's also unfortunate that the Flash memory type used for SD cards and similar has a well-known limitation of a finite number of write cycles. There's more info on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Limitations. This applies to all Flash devices, whether it's the SSD drive in a laptop or phone or a Navionics chart card.

Regards,
Tom