So I'll kick off with a little about me. I am from the UK, and a gamer for years. I am 46 years of age. I have built and troubleshot PC issues over many years and, although I don't claim to be an expert, know my way around a PC pretty well.
I jumped on the ASUS ALLY bandwagon and pr-eordered, and have to say I quite like it while accepting its faults. Windows 11 is not going to be easy to navigate on the Ally without some knowledge of Windows quirks and I think I can work around most things, until the time comes when hopefully there are some improvements, in both device and OS.
Onto the SD card reader issue! I have not got my card to be seen by the Ally properly, (more on this later) and I think many people are jumping to all sorts of conclusions, as those affected talk amongst themselves. How many are unaffected we do not know, as they are too busy playing games to chat about it here or on Reddit, etc.
So far I can say that to me it seems like a driver issue. Why do I think that? Well I bought an SD card like most people who wanted more space may well have done, simply because I don’t like the idea of opening up a brand new device and replacing the SSD. The Ally doesn’t see my card. That’s the short story, but it does see older cards I have. And by old I mean pretty old (a 2GB and 16GB card from way back, a random brand and a Kingston). I also got it to see my new card when it was formatted on another PC to NTFS rather than the exFAT it was.
If you want more details keep reading, as there’s more to it, but my hunch right now is that it really doesn’t like certain brands of card even though the card in questions is a SANDISK - EXTREME PRO MICROSDXC, 1TB 200MB/S 140MB/S A2 C10 V30.
In the very first instance I did what anyone would, popped the card in and it failed to even boot properly. The card slows everything down to a crawl, and Windows Explorer seems to hang. So I booted up without a card and tried again. Windows doesn’t see the card. I’ve tried 2 drivers, one from Intel, but specifically 1 from the ASUS support page. At one stage the Device Manager was showing an SD Host device, which I think is the driver Windows installed for the SD reader. I couldn’t for a while get the driver updated to the Genesys one from Asus/Intel.
I actually decided to do a reinstall of the OS using the cloud recovery service and start over. The reader now shows up under “memory technology devices” in the Device Manager using the ASUS driver and by this point I had formatted my card to NTFS. Though it took a ton of time to attempt to read the card and Windows ground to a halt, at least it saw it!
Pop in my old SD Micro cards and all is fine. My Extreme Pro card reads fine on my desktop PC via a very old USB card reader stick I found (very handy) once popped into an SD adapter. So the card itself seems fine. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d used another brand it would be ok. I mean I can’t speak for everyone, but the fact it has been seen in Windows and other cards are working (from other brands) makes me wonder if the reader is just very fussy about what cards it expects.
DO I RETURN MY DEVICE!? First ASUS must acknowledge what they believe the problem is. Obviously I could install a new NVMe in future, but if there is a genuine hardware issue that is being acknowledged then I’d return it. If they do feel it is more likely a driver issue, I’ll hang on. But I did lay down a lot of money for this SD card that I cannot use right now and am a little annoyed by it all.
I know this was a long dive into my own experience, but if anyone else can relate to this, then I hope it helps us in finding a solution.
