Galaxy S3, microSD card & battery drain

TTony

This being an Android techy forum, I thought I'm likely to get an answer ...

I have a Galaxy S3, running Android 4.0.4.  I haven't, and have no interest in, rooting it, up-flashing it, or anything similar.

I primarily use it for phone-type activities, but also a little for email, sattynavvy, and media playing (downloaded podcasts via DogCatcher, some Amazon mp3 downloads via the Amazon player app, and mp3s transferred from my PC).

Until a week or so back, it would quite happily do everything that I asked of it, in exchange for a battery re-charge every other day. 

About a week or so back, battery consumption increased hugely - it would drain the battery in <10-12 hours.

No change in my usage pattern, and no new apps installed (AFAIK).

I've tried nuking all the running / cached apps.  Didn't seem to make any difference.  I bought a new battery.  Didn't seem to make any difference.  I deleted Dogcatcher and all podcasts.  Didn't seem to make any difference.

I took out the microSD card (on which all podcasts & mp3s are stored) and battery usage seemed to revert to normal levels - ie quite happily a couple of days between charges.

 

So, what's going on with the microSD card to drain the battery, and how can I fix it?

 

Suggestions please, oh wise forum.

wibble

Try a new sd card?

Maybe it's on it's way out - you tried saving to it from the phone again? If it's taking ages due to errors it'll be draining the battery.

is it a pukka card and not a fake?

TTony

It's a genuine (Samsung) 32Gb card.

I'll try wiping it clean and copying everything back to it ...

Myranda

My S3 was be a s**t recently. 

Might sound like an IT crowd thing to say... but try turning it off an on again - my battery life came back.

Also I've got a sandisk 64gb card it mine which is nearly full - if it's happy with that then I can't see it being just the card.

TTony

Seems like the card is borked.

Can't get it to read in anything else, and the phone refuses to mount it now too.

Pah.

Myranda

Well there's your problem!

I really hope my SD card lives a long and healthy life - not sure I can be bothered with putting my music onto another one - took ages

bigjon

I haven't been on http://androidforums.com/ for so long it says I've got over 23,000 unread posts in my 'favourite forums' feed, but I read it regularly when I first got my S3 and I read of enough people having problems with their SD cards to put me off ever putting one in my own phone. It's a right pain because I record one gig video and the memory is full!

Cirrus

Touch wood I've had no problem with my 64gb card.

Actually I think they're quite resilient phones, mine got soaked on an ill-advised drunken ascent of a hill in heavy rain and a gale. When I got back it wouldn't charge and there was water on the inside of both camera lenses. Intermittent behaviour for a few days followed, so I did the old bag of rice trick. It's fine now.

What you've got is an incredible amount of technology packed into a very small package for a very affordable price. To be honest, I'm surprised they work at all!

holnrew

Isn't there an official version of Jellybean?