I would love for this to be a cool Halloween story, but no, it's real and that's what just happened to me.
Two months ago I bought a 512Gb Samsung EVO A2 V30 (not cheap) exclusively for use in the Rog Ally (the card has never been used in another device). So far so good, the card worked and everything perfect.
Last weekend, the Ally hung in the file explorer and when I removed the card it recovered. Knowing the history of readers and dead SD cards I feared the worst and when I put the card back in, bingo. The card does not appear in the explorer nor does it make the typical notification noise.
I proceed to factory reset the device. I update the punctual things it asks for and try the SD again, without success. So I consider the reader dead and open a support ticket.
4 days later I get a call from ASUS to manage the RMA and the technician asks me what BIOS version I have (I look at it and I didn't have the latest one). The technician tells me to update, just in case, but he sends me the link to manage the RMA anyway.
I proceed to update the BIOS and to my surprise, the SD reader is working again (hooray! I guess?). So I reinstall the stuff I had and copy the files and such.
Today I call support to let them know that the update seems to have fixed it and I'm still configuring the Ally.
I copy quite a few files to the SD (~120Gb) without problems, and when everything is copied, I go to "My Computer" and see that the card is practically empty. WTF?
I open the card and of all that had been copied, supposedly well, it turns out that there are only a couple of folders and few files. I try to format the card and it gives me error, I take it out of the Ally, I try to format it with Disk Utility on my mac and error too.
It turns out that now the 512Gb card is a beautiful brick. But the SD reader on my Ally recognizes the card when I put it in, it just won't let me do anything with it.
Obviously I don't risk putting another card in the reader, because I'm 100% sure that it was the Ally's reader that screwed it up. Especially seeing the amount of problems it is giving in the first models, like mine.
Tomorrow I will call ASUS to see if they will repair the device (I do not trust to put anything else in there) and see how to solve the problem that the microSD is dead, it was 2 months old and cost me 50€.
To be honest, I'd wish the reader didn't worked again, so I would have processed the RMA and still have a perfectly functional card....
