Dashcam... why does it not work

See MASTER THREAD: USB drives that work with Sentry and TeslaCam

 

Tesla replaced my usb hub. It just died all of a sudden.

 

there are industrial rated (ie, large temperature swing rated) flash cards. I have some sandisk industrials from work that I might swich over to (micro-sd card, so it does need an adapter).

most consumer drives are not rated for the temp swings that cars can see. that can be one failure.

another is all the writes that happen. again, junky consumer drives that are manufactured 'at a price point' will die due to all the heavy write activity. industrial drives have more spare 'sectors' and better wear leveling.j

you also have to be aware that every metal to metal contact can oxidize and cause connectivity problems. I hate having extra cables; just more failure points.

here's an industrial sd-card, expensive though it is!

https://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-Industrial-MicroSD-UHS-I-SDSDQAF3-008G/dp/B07BLQHVQD/

the ones we have at work were all black, not a white label. not sure how many grades they make. in fact, you probably don't want to buy from amazon, you want to buy from a trusted vendor, direct, if you can (memsticks are one of the most faked things; and if you buy sandisk from ebay sellers, 90% chance its a fake product. amazon is also becoming like this, sigh...)

finally, ext4fs does not need defragging; fat32 does. so if you can make your drive ext4fs (linux format) that will also help with file-based operation speed.


PS: anything marked 'pro' is probably still just consumer junk. same with 'high endurance'. industrial is what you want, for automotive rated applications (in fact, there's actually a catagory called 'automotive' but I doubt you'll easily find automotive-rated sd cards that you and I can buy in single unit qtys).

 

I'm going to order a few low profile ones to try out. I'm a big believer in 'strain relief' and things that hang out will wiggle and vibrate and cause mechanical/electrical bounce. so I'm looking at things like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HFQQ71F

and this

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZSFYVXW

the low price points scare me, as I don't think these will be a good match for the high-end industrial micro sd card. I worry more about the finger contacts than anything else. I might prep the fingers (if I can get to them) with some deoxit 5 contact cleaner.

 

if its a real sandisk and not a fake, its probably as good as you will find, for that form factor. I may try that one, also.

I'd like to have an A/B switch, though, of some sort; that would let me plug in a laptop, switch the 'drive' over from tesla to laptop, copy files, reformat drive, release drive and give back to tesla. if I can do that without a mechanical plug/unplug, that saves wear. while the tesla does not use usb3, your laptop will, so for faster copy, might as well get a usb3 sdcard adapter.

 

1. Use endurance sd card
2. Format to Fat32
3. Create a new folder: TeslaCam

 

This for sure

TL;DR: For the most part, it doesn't matter what drive you get, all have the potential to fail. Many (myself included) are convinced that it is a Tesla SW issue. Some people feel that an SSD such as the Samsung T5 work better.

I currently use a $33 256GB thumb drive from Costco and have had zero failure to date. I have a Roadie on order for viewing capability.